SuitabookThe Miserable Mill
Lemony Snicket
- Reading
- Try reading a little together first, then check whether the gloomy humour feels enjoyable or too bleak. You can pause to discuss any scene that feels unsettling.
- Themes
- Misfortune and comic gloom: The Baudelaire siblings encounter disasters while living and working at a lumber mill; the narrator repeatedly warns that their story is unhappy. The gloomy framing sits alongside the book’s classification as humorous fiction, but that does not establish whether the events themselves are treated as comic, serious or both.
- Accident and injury: The narrator names a terrible accident resulting in injury and a giant pincher machine among the book’s unpleasantries. The events signal physical danger, but the available detail does not show how the accident happens or how the book evaluates it.
- Worth knowing
- The overall framing is unhappy, and the detail and severity of the injury are not clear.