A Series of Unfortunate Events

The Slippery Slope (10)

Condition: New, Hardcover

Author: Lemony Snicket

Illustrator: Brett Helquist

The Slippery Slope is the tenth installment in the book series A Series of Unfortunate Events by Daniel Handler under the pseudonym of Lemony Snicket.

Plot Summary

The book starts where The Carnivorous Carnival left off. Klaus and Violet are rolling down a steep mountainside in an out-of control caravan, while Sunny is held captive by Count Olaf and his henchmen. Violet devises a brake for the caravan by using the hammocks as a drag chute and spreading sticky foods on the wheels. The two siblings travel up the mountain and take shelter from the vicious Snow Gnats in a cave, which is occupied by a troupe of Snow Scouts. Carmelita Spats, the children's rival from The Austere Academy, is one of the Snow Scouts, along with her uncle Bruce and a boy wearing a sweater, who seems to possess knowledge of V.F.D. During the night, he talks to them and leads them up the natural chimney (also known as the Vertical Flame Diversion) to the V.F.D. headquarters.

Olaf, his sidekicks, and Sunny are on the peak of Mount Fraught, the tallest mountain in the region. The adults are cruel to Sunny, forcing her to sleep in a casserole dish and cook them breakfast the next morning. Olaf insists that what she has prepared is disgusting and orders the Hook-Handed Man to fetch salmon from the nearby stream. Two people, a woman with hair but no beard and a man with a beard but no hair arrive, and announce that they have successfully burned down the V.F.D. headquarters. They also give Count Olaf the first twelve pages of the Snicket File. The man gives Esmé a green cigarette which is actually a Verdant Flammable Device. Sunny notices Esmé's Verdant Flammable Device and uses one to signal her siblings under the pretext of smoking the just-caught salmon for Olaf and his evil associates.

Meanwhile, Violet, Klaus and the boy come to the V.F.D. headquarters and find it has burnt down. The boy reveals himself to be Quigley Quagmire, whom the children believed to be dead. Violet, Klaus, and Quigley see, rising from the cliff, the plume of green smoke being emitted from Sunny's Verdant Flammable Device. Violet invents an ice-climbing device from a sled and forks, which Quigley and she use to climb the mountain. At one point, they stop for a rest and Snicket implies that they share a kiss. It is obvious after this point that the two have fallen in love, and many references are made to their romantic attachment. Violet wants Sunny to return with them, but she refuses, telling her sister that she can spy on Olaf and learn useful information. Violet reluctantly agrees after Sunny herself claims, "I am not a baby."

Violet, Quigley and Klaus hatch a plan to lure Esmé to them and use her to bait Olaf into giving Sunny back. They dig a pit and light a Verdant Flammable Device next to it. Esmé sees some green smoke at the bottom of the slope. She goes down it, thinking the smoke is coming from the "in" cigarettes. The children realize that two wrongs don't equal a right and that there is a better way to rescue Sunny than kidnapping Esmé. When she reaches the bottom, she runs into three masked strangers (the Baudelaires and Quigley), and they help her climb back up the slope, hoping to somehow force Count Olaf to give up Sunny.

Claiming to be Volunteers, the three demand Sunny's return. Olaf refuses, until Violet pretends to know the location of a missing sugar bowl (which is mysteriously important to Olaf and his group). Olaf barters for the dish, but the Snow Scouts reach the peak. Klaus, Violet, and Quigley take off their masks to convince the scouts to run. Olaf orders the two white faced women to grab Sunny and throw her off the mountain, but they leave in protest and quit working for Olaf. As they leave, they say that one of their siblings was killed when their house burned down. The scouts, apart from Carmelita Spats, and several of Count Olaf's associates are caught in a net in a plot to recruit them to Count Olaf's troupe. Carmelita is convinced to join Olaf and Esmé in their evil schemes. The Baudelaires and Quigley grab a toboggan and slide down the slope, but when they reach the bottom, the frozen waterfall shatters. In the ensuing flood, the Baudelaire siblings and Quigley Quagmire are separated. Quigley and Violet call desperately for each other, and Quigley tries to tell them to meet him somewhere, but cannot be heard over the rush of the running water.

Series Summary

The series follows the adventures of three siblings, Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire, after their parents were killed in a fire at the family mansion. In The Bad Beginning, they briefly live with a friend of their parents, Mr. Poe, who is the person in charge of the Baudelaire fortune after the Baudelaire parents' deaths, before being sent to live with Count Olaf, whom Mr. Poe describes as either the siblings' "third cousin four times removed, or their fourth cousin three times removed". The siblings discover that he intends to get his hands on the Baudelaire fortune, which awaits Violet, the eldest child, when she turns eighteen. In the first seven books, Olaf, each time in different disguises, follows the children wherever they go so he can get closer to the orphans and steal their fortune. Their roles switch in the eighth through twelfth books, in which the orphans adopt disguises while on the run from the police after being framed by Count Olaf, disguised as Detective Dupin, for the murder of Count Omar (really Jacques Snicket). The Baudelaires routinely try to get help from Mr. Poe, but Poe is always either busy with work, oblivious to the danger Olaf poses, unaware that the disguised Olaf is not who he claims to be or simply thinks the Baudelaires are lying.

Each of the three siblings has a distinctive skill that often helps them during their adventures. Violet is always inventing new things to help them, Klaus is always finding out new information by reading books, and Sunny has extremely sharp teeth that can bite almost anything in two. [4] In later books, Sunny learns how to cook, as she begins to grow to the normal size for her teeth so cooking becomes her primary skill. Sunny originally spoke in single word utterances which are often a variety of incomplete sentences and some short word sentences as well. Their meaning is either disguised by being spelled phonetically (e.g., 'surchmi' in The Slippery Slope), backwards (e.g., 'edasurc' [crusade] in The Carnivorous Carnival) through cultural references (Sunny says: 'Matahari', followed by a definition of 'If I stay, I can spy on them and find out.'), or being written in other languages (e.g., Shalom or Sayonara), but eventually she begins to speak more in complete English sentences, her first possibly being "I'm not a baby" in The Slippery Slope, or "Like me" in The Vile Village.

Lemony Snicket, the author of the stories and the pseudonym of Daniel Handler, is actually a character himself on the periphery of the stories. He follows the Baudelaires, researching and recording their exploits. Bruce Butt noted in 2002 that in each book a letter from Snicket to his editor is included, presented as exciting updates on Snicket's research into the Baudelaire orphans, which Butt considered to be "the slyest aspect of the way this series has been ingeniously promoted". Over the course of the series, the Baudelaires learn some vague information about Snicket and possibly meet him briefly in The Wide Window and The Penultimate Peril.

1. The Bad Beginning
2. The Reptile Room
3. The Wide Window
4. The Miserable Mill
5. The Austere Academy
6. The Ersatz Elevator
7. The Vile Village
8. The Hostile Hospital
9. The Carnivorous Carnival
10. The Slippery Slope
11. The Grim Grotto
12. The Penultimate Peril
13. The End

A Series of Unfortunate Events

The Slippery Slope (10)