A Series of Unfortunate Events

The Wide Window (3)

Condition: New, Hardcover

Author: Lemony Snicket

Illustrator: Brett Helquist

The Wide Window is a children's novel and the third novel in the book series A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. In The Wide Window, the Baudelaire orphans are sent to live with their third guardian, a distant relative, Mrs. Anwhistle, otherwise known as Aunt Josephine, who lives on a house overlooking a lake.

Plot Summary

The book begins with the three Baudelaire children, Violet, Klaus and Sunny riding the Fickle Ferry across Lake Lachrymose to Damocles Dock, where a taxi awaits them to take them to their new home. Mr. Poe has merely given the children a bag of peppermints (which will play a big role later in the story), to which they are allergic, and sent them on their way.

The taxi pulls up a steep hill to a house that sits off the side of the cliff, held there by spidery, metal-looking stilts. They meet their new guardian, Aunt Josephine Anwhistle. Although she is a kind old woman, she is frightened by many things. Ever since her husband, Ike, died in Lake Lachrymose after being eaten by the Lachrymose Leeches, she has developed many irrational fears about the lake and her own possessions. She won't touch the phone, the radiator, the refrigerator, the oven, or even the doorknobs. She also has a terrible fear of realtors. Aunt Josephine loves grammar and possesses an enormous library on the subject in her home. The room containing her library has an enormous window (after which The Wide Window is named), which overlooks the lake.

After the Baudelaires tell Aunt Josephine that Hurricane Herman is coming, the children and their new guardian head down to town to obtain food and other household supplies. There they come across "Captain Sham," Count Olaf in disguise. He tells them that he is the owner of a boat rental company and lost his leg after it was eaten by the Lachrymose Leeches. The children warn Aunt Josephine, but they cannot prove "Sham" is Olaf in disguise, since he has a wooden leg where the ankle bearing his tattoo of an eye should be. Furthermore, Aunt Josephine finds Captain Sham charming, and won't listen to the Baudelaires. Later that night, the children are awakened by a loud crash, and they rush to the library to find the window broken and their aunt's suicide note.

The three siblings are shocked because the note says that the children's new guardian will be Captain Sham. Klaus becomes suspicious because it is filled with spelling and grammatical errors, not something Aunt Josephine would have done. They reason that Count Olaf is behind it and call Mr. Poe using the telephone. Mr. Poe arrives, but they cannot prove their suspicions, as the note is written in Josephine's hand writing. While Mr. Poe and Olaf are discussing matters at The Anxious Clown, the children purposefully start an allergic reaction with the peppermints Mr. Poe had given them, and escape back to the house. By this time, Hurricane Herman is already arriving on Lake Lachrymose. At the house, Klaus discovers that all the spelling and grammar mistakes in the note form an encoded message, the words "Curdled Cave", presumably a cave somewhere on the shore of Lake Lachrymose. As the children search frantically for a map of the lake, one of the stilts that supports Aunt Josephine's house in place is struck by lightning, and the house begins to slide down the cliff. After narrowly escaping with their lives, the Baudelaires watch as Aunt Josephine's house crumbles and falls into Lake Lachrymose.

The Baudelaires hurry down to the docks to steal a boat from Captain Sham's rental company, but the rental company is being guarded by Count Olaf's henchman who looks like neither a man nor a woman. Sunny outsmarts it, and the children manage to sail across Lake Lachrymose to Curdled Cave, where they find Aunt Josephine hiding. Aunt Josephine claims that Olaf forced her to write the note, but rather than actually committing suicide, she threw a chair through the window and went into hiding, leaving only the coded suicide note behind.

The Baudelaires convince her to join them, but as they're sailing back across the lake, Lachrymose Leeches attack. The children are puzzled, since they haven't consumed any food within the last hour (The leeches are blind and attack only if they smell food) but Aunt Josephine admits to having eaten a banana shortly before the Baudelaires arrived. The leeches ram their boat and devour it as it fills up with water. Violet successfully invents a signal for help, and Captain Sham rescues them in another boat. Josephine pleads with Olaf to spare her life, offering to give him the Baudelaires and disguising herself far away, but Olaf throws Aunt Josephine into the water, where she is supposedly devoured by the leeches, and takes the children with him back to Damocles Dock.

Back at the docks, Mr. Poe is about to hand the children over to Sham when Sunny bites into Sham's fake wooden leg, breaking it off. Olaf claims that his leg has miraculously regenerated, but Mr. Poe has already seen the tattoo of an eye on Olaf's ankle. Having been once more unmasked, Olaf flees with his associate before the children and Mr. Poe are able to chase after them.

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 Wide Window (3)