Chapter-by-Chapter: The Reptile Room

The Reptile Room is the second in the Series of Unfortunate Events series of books. My copy, as with The Bad Beginning is a hardback and the spine colour is green. Again it’s got the thorny vine pattern pattern but this time there’s also a wiggly snake design there as well.

The book itself is about the same thickness as the first book. Like, the Harry Potter books they don’t start becoming doorstoppers until about halfway through the series (and even then never to quite the same degree as the Harry Potter books). Hopefully this means that the chapters will remain around ten to twelve pages so I can read through them relatively quickly.

The picture on the front shows Sunny wrapped in the coils of a large snake. She’s biting his tail and it seems to be ready to bite her back. Meanwhile in the background there’s a red headed man waving his hands. I vaguely remember that bit in the book. I want to say the man in the background is the latest (and as we know from the end of the last book, tragic) Montgomery Montgomery.

What I remember of this book is largely influenced by what I remember of the film adaptation of the first three books in the series. As the three books were squished into one film I’m fairly certain that I’m not remembering very much of this book.

I know that Montgomery Montgomery is a much better guardian than Olaf ever was. He was going to take the children somewhere, but Olaf shows up in disguise. This time around he’s going by the name Stefano (which I spent ages trying to work out if it was an anagram of Olaf somehow the first time I read the story).

I also know that they meet lots of interesting reptiles in this book, including the snake on the cover, obviously.

I remember what happens to the children at the end of this book. But I’m not going to mention that here because I don’t want to make this too spoilery and also as I said above, I think I’ve been influenced a little too much by the movie adaptation (it is wonderful because Billy Connolly is in it).


This is the only post today, just to kick off what I’ll be reading next. I’ll be posting my first chapter review on Monday afternoon and then the next chapters will follow Tuesday afternoon, Thursday afternoon and then a double helping on Friday. Feel free to grab a copy and join in.