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The Grim Grotto Book Review

The Grim Grotto is a 2004 children’s book by Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler). It’s the eleventh entry in A Series of Unfortunate Events and a pretty good one overall.

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“People aren’t either wicked or noble.

They’re like chef’s salads,

with good things and bad things

chopped and mixed together in a

vinaigrette of confusion and conflict“

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The Baudelaires discover the crew of the Queequeg submarine searching for a mysterious sugar bowl deep in the grotto. There, they must face Olaf and his girlfriend once again while trying to help Sunny, who is in mortal danger due to a very dangerous rare fungi specimen. The setting of this book is excellent. There are a lot of things here that I love and naturally gravitate toward, such as underwater, caves, interesting fungi, submarines etc. And all of it was very well realized, making the novel rather adventurous.

Even more could have been done with this premise as unfortunately the novel got stuck with just a couple of important storylines throughout, but at least those stories worked and were crucial for the rest of the series. The newly introduced character, Flora, is very well written. I liked her a lot and her brother being the hook-handed man (now named Fernald) was a beautiful revelation that really worked.

At this point in the series, the author truly needed to add some twists, and thankfully he did just that. This revelation worked wonders to make the entire series more epic and especially more mature as before this the lines between good and evil were clearly demarcated, but as is showcased in the examples of Flora and Fernald, that is now always the case. Both of these characters are superb and I want to see more from them in the later books.

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Olaf and Esme did not shine this time around unfortunately. In fact, they were the source of some of the worst aspects of The Grim Grotto as a whole. The decision to give them these rhyming lines of dialogue made them not only childish, but also obnoxious. Esme literally being an octopus in her clothing was a fun, campy choice that worked, but overall these villains are great and they deserved better and more memorable treatment here.

Carmelita is as annoying as ever, but here that is intentional and the humor surrounding her horribly talentless self was actually pretty strong. She was better used here than in ‘The Slippery Slope’ in my opinion. What they did to Sunny here was unfortunate. In the previous installment, she was badass, but here she is in distress with Violet and Klaus trying to help her throughout most of the book’s second half. But she still continues to grow, which is well hinted here. I also liked the emphasis on various sciences here and how important book reading could be, especially for these siblings.

The book is slower at first, but it gets more eventful as it goes by. The attention to detail is mostly fantastic, the setting is wonderfully realized, the emphasis on fungi and submarines was terrific and the descriptive passages are great. Per usual, the author is at his worst at writing dialogue, which is here very childish and annoying, but at least the humor could be surprisingly solid at times.

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The Grim Grotto ended in such an interesting way. Mr. Poe appeared, which was unexpected, and he was as clueless as always. Eventually, they go with the woman named Kit Snicket by a taxi, which was a highly hopeful cliffhanger for once. It will be interesting to find out more about this Snicket family, and hopefully Quigley and all the other characters will get their proper due in the final two novels.