Chapter-by-Chapter: The Vile Village

I’m a very bad reader person. I completely forgot the title of this book until I reached the end of The Ersatz Elevator and had it spelled out for me there. I couldn’t make it out when I was sitting in my armchair across the room from the bookcase where the Series of Unfortunate Events books live and so in my blog schedule notes I’d been referring to these posts as ‘Chapter-by-Chapter: The Next Book’. Can’t think why they never went with that title for one of the actual books myself.

I remember a bit about this book. I remember that the children have run out of guardians but there is a thing about it taking a village to raise a child so they are taken in by an actual village. The children are given the option of which village they want to go to and pick the one with V.F.D. in its name. I think that stands of Village of Fowl Devotees. They have a thing for birds.

The picture on the cover is reminiscent of something from The Birds. We can see Klaus climbing a rope ladder, presumably that’s Violet’s feet above him, and little Sunny is clinging on in front of him with her teeth. They’re surrounded by birds, which I’m going to say are the V.F.D. crows and their feathers. I think they’re up high in the air too.

Other important things to note: The spine of the book is a lovely dark red colour. It’s a little bit like the first one. As well as having the familiar thorny sort of pattern on the spine we’ve also got the border bit which is a pattern made of bird feathers. I love how these little touches always tie into the story. It’s very neat.

The back cover reminds me that newspaper articles, or an article, play a part in the story. I want to say the Baudelaires get put in prison too, but I’m not sure that I’m remembering that clearly. The back cover certainly says that someone gets arrested so I think I’m right in thinking that there’s a prison featured in here somewhere.

Other than that, there’s not much else I can remember. And as this reread is showing me, I don’t remember anywhere near as much of these books as I thought I did.


So come back on Monday when we’ll get stuck into the first chapter.