Series of Unfortunate Events #9: The Carnivorous Carnival, A

Series of Unfortunate Events #9: The Carnivorous Carnival, A

by Lemony Snicket

Narrated by Tim Curry

Unabridged — 4 hours, 54 minutes

Series of Unfortunate Events #9: The Carnivorous Carnival, A

Series of Unfortunate Events #9: The Carnivorous Carnival, A

by Lemony Snicket

Narrated by Tim Curry

Unabridged — 4 hours, 54 minutes

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Overview

NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

Everybody loves a carnival! Who can fail to delight in the colourful people, the unworldly spectacle, the fabulous freaks?

A carnival is a place for good family fun-as long as one has a family, that is. For the Baudelaire orphans, their time at the carnival turns out to be yet another episode in a now unbearable series of unfortunate events. In fact, in this appalling ninth installment in Lemony Snicket's serial, the siblings must confront a terrible lie, a caravan, and Chabo the wolf baby.

With millions of readers worldwide, and the Baudelaire's fate turning from unpleasant to unseemly, it is clear that Lemony Snicket has taken nearly all the fun out of children's books.


Editorial Reviews

bn.com

The Barnes & Noble Review
For fans of that slippery author Lemony Snicket, Book the Ninth is here, and it's completely (but wonderfully) dreadful.

When the Baudelaire Orphans finally make it out of Count Olaf's car trunk (from Book the Eighth), they wind up at the horribly perilous Caligari Carnival. Trying to avoid capture but desperate to find out more information about a possible surviving parent, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny pose as circus freaks, only to be humiliated in front of visitors and pushed to the brink of consumption by lions. Fortunately, though, the three discover a few surprises about fortune-telling Madame Lulu, who offers a faint clue about V.F.D. and even the Snicket family itself.

Snicket fans will be in Ninth Heaven. Again, it's a sad state of affairs for the Baudelaires, but there are some fascinating morsels of hope, plus a few small surprises that might help link it all together. With riveting suspense, wicked intentions, and gullible freaks, The Carnivorous Carnival is definitely an installment that can't be missed. Matt Warner

Publishers Weekly

In the ninth title in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Carnivorous Carnival, the Baudelaire siblings are falsely accused of murder. On the run from Count Olaf (the real killer), the three disguise themselves in Madame Lulu's House of Freaks; Violet and Klaus masquerade as the two-headed Beverly/Elliot; Sunny poses as Chabo the Wolf Baby. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

Gr 4-7-Tim Curry (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Pirates of Penzance) has the perfect, mysterious voice for this reading of Lemony Snicket's book (HarperCollins, 2002). The plot, as in the other eight titles in the series, centers around the three orphaned Baudelaire children and their avoidance of Count Olaf, who is presumably trying to obtain their deceased parents' fortune. The children find their woeful refuge in a carnival, becoming more involved than any of them had planned. Madame Lulu's House of Freaks welcomes the children as a two-headed freak (Violet and Klaus) and Chabo, the Wolf Baby (Sunny). Will the orphans finally find out the secret meaning of the initials VFD? Will they discover something about their parents and the fire that made them orphans? The Carniverous Carnival takes listeners one step closer to solving the series' mysteries. Tim Curry's sinister renditions of Snicket's plottings will delight, but this title will be more thoroughly enjoyed by those who have experienced the other eight episodes. Don't hesitate to purchase this if Lemony Snicket is popular in any form with your patrons.-Kirsten Martindale, Buford Academy, GA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

BN ID: 2940170354795
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 09/21/2004
Series: A Series of Unfortunate Events
Edition description: Unabridged
Age Range: 10 - 13 Years

Read an Excerpt

Series of Unfortunate Events #9


By Lemony Snicket

HarperCollins Publishers

Copyright ©2002 Lemony Snicket
All right reserved.

ISBN: 0064410129

Chapter One

When my workday is over, and I have closed my notebook, hidden my pen, and sawed holes in my rented canoe so that it cannot be found, I often like to spend the evening in conversation with my few surviving friends. Sometimes we discuss literature. Sometimes we discuss the people who are trying to destroy us, and if there is any hope of escaping from them. And sometimes we discuss frightening and troublesome animals that might be nearby, and this topic always leads to much disagreement over which part of a frightening and troublesome beast is the most frightening and troublesome. Some say the teeth of the beast, because teeth are used for eating children, and often their parents, and gnawing their bones. Some say the claws of the beast, because claws are used for ripping things to shreds. And some say the hair of the beast, because hair can make allergic people sneeze.

But I always insist that the most frightening part of any beast is its belly, for the simple reason that if you are seeing the belly of the beast it means you have already seen the teeth of the beast and the claws of the beast and even the hair of the beast, and now you are trapped and there is probably no hope for you. For this reason, the phrase "in the belly of the beast" has become anexpression which means "inside some terrible place with little chance of escaping safely," and it is not an expression one should look forward to using.

I'm sorry to tell you that this book will use the expression "the belly of the beast" three times before it is over, not counting all of the times I have already used "the belly of the beast" in order to warn you of all the times "the belly of the beast" will appear. Three times over the course of this story, characters will be inside some terrible place with little chance of escaping safely, and for that reason I would put this book down and escape safely yourself, because this woeful story is so very dark and wretched and damp that the experience of reading it will make you feel as if you are in the belly of the beast, and that time doesn't count either.

The Baudelaire orphans were in the belly of the beast - that is, in the dark and cramped trunk of a long, black automobile. Unless you are a small, portable object, you probably prefer to sit in a seat when you are traveling by automobile, so you can lean back against the upholstery, look out the window at the scenery going by, and feel safe and secure with a seat belt fastened low and tight across your lap. But the Baudelaires could not lean back, and their bodies were aching from squishing up against one another for several hours. They had no window to look out of, only a few bullet holes in the trunk made from some violent encounter I have not found the courage to research. And they felt anything but safe and secure as they thought about the other passengers in the car, and tried to imagine where they were going.

The driver of the automobile was a man named Count Olaf, a wicked person with one eyebrow instead of two and a greedy desire for money instead of respect for other people. The Baudelaires had first met Count Olaf after receiving the news that their parents had been killed in a terrible fire, and had soon discovered he was only interested in the enormous fortune their mother and father had left behind. With unceasing determination - a phrase which here means "no matter where the three children went" - Count Olaf had pursued them, trying one dastardly technique after another to get his hands on their fortune. So far he had been unsuccessful, although he'd had plenty of help from his girlfriend, Esmi Squalor - an equally wicked, if more fashionable, person who was now sitting beside him in the front seat of the automobile - and an assortment of assistants, including a bald man with an enormous nose, two women who liked to wear white powder all over their faces, and a nasty man who had hooks instead of hands. All of these people were sitting in the back of the automobile, where the children could sometimes hear them speaking over the roar of the engine and the sounds of the road.

One would think, with such a wretched crew as traveling companions, that the Baudelaire siblings would have found some other way to travel rather than sneaking into the trunk, but the three children had been fleeing from circumstances even more frightening and dangerous than Olaf and his assistants and there had been no time to be choosy. But as their journey wore on, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny grew more and more worried about their situation. The sunlight coming in through the bullet holes faded to evening, and the road beneath them turned bumpy and rough, and the Baudelaire orphans tried to imagine where it was they were going and what would happen when they got there. "Are we there yet?" The voice of the hook-handed man broke a long silence. "I told you not to ask me that anymore," replied Olaf with a snarl. "We'll get there when we get there, and that is that."

"Could we possibly make a short stop?" asked one of the white-faced women. "I noticed a sign for a rest station in a few miles."

"We don't have time to stop anywhere," Olaf said sharply. "If you needed to use the bathroom, you should have gone before we left."

"But the hospital was on fire," the woman whined.

"Yes, let's stop," said the bald man. "We haven't had anything to eat since lunch, and my stomach is grumbling."

"We can't stop," Esmi said. "There are no restaurants out here in the hinterlands that are in."



Continues...


Excerpted from Series of Unfortunate Events #9 by Lemony Snicket Copyright ©2002 by Lemony Snicket. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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