#titlew

When Did You See Her Last? is the second book of four in Lemony Snicket's new series, All The Wrong Questions. I did read the first, Who Could That Be At This Hour? but I didn't review it here, so this review will sort of cover the series so far.

ATWQ is about the childhood of Lemony Snicket and his apprenticeship in an organization that no one knows about. For people who like A Series of Unfortunate Events, I feel quite sure that they will like this new series as well. While, it doesn't focus on the Baudelaire children, it still has the same distinctive voice and darker tone of Lemony Snicket's writing. In this series, there is more of a noir detective feel but it works very well.

The character of Lemony Snicket is smart and an easy character to like and follow as are his friends. All the characters are just as colorful and interesting and funny and intriguing as one would expect from Snicket. And once again, like ASOUE, the children are the heroes and they seem to be surrounded by either evil or incompetent (or, sometimes, a combination of the two) adults.

The first book, Who Could That Be At This Hour?, sees Snicket's arrival in a town called Stain'd-by-the-Sea and his attempts to find a statue of an imaginary beast and return it to its rightful owners.

When Did You See Her Last? picks up not long after and deals with the disappearance of a local girl.

One of my favorite things about this series so far is the setting of the little town of Stain'd-by-the-Sea. Once the leading manufacturer of ink, Stain'd-by-the-Sea was home to Ink Inc. which made the darkest and boldest ink in the world by extracting it from octopi that live in underwater caves. But the town has since fallen on hard times, the sea is no longer a sea and there are very few octopi left. I loved the backstory and the desolation of the town lends itself very well to the tone of the story.

Why We Broke Up is written in the form of a (very long) letter from Min Green to Ed Slaterton, telling him why they broke up and how various items of their relationship correlate that.

I suppose I liked Why We Broke Up, I liked the plot but couldn't really like the characters and it struck me as being pretentious. I think that's the right word. Maybe self-important.

Min, herself, was pretentious. She consistently talked about old movies as if anyone who didn't know them was, in some way, inferior. And she clearly felt that her group of friends was superior to other people simply because those other people were popular. But one of the things that really got to me was the language. Min had a strange way of talking. For example: "I was a fool, is what."

And it was confusing. There were so many parts in which I wasn't sure what was actually going on. Twice I thought that they'd had sex (and I'm still not completely sure what they did; the term eventually used is "everything but") before I figured out they must not have because Min later made a big deal about something Ed said that made her think he was telling her they were definitely going to have sex that weekend. I was often confused like this about what exactly was going on.

The best part of the book, in my opinion, was the pictures. For each item there is a painting (done by Maira Kalman) and they are gorgeous.

I'd heard a lot of good things about this book and so maybe my expectations were too high. And maybe I'm being too critical. I didn't hate it by any means but there were just too many little things that bugged me and so I was disappointed. And in the book, it wasn't exactly a bad book. But it wasn't for me and I probably wouldn't recommend it. I just wanted so much to like it and I couldn't.