From the Bookshelf of *~Can't Stop Reading~*…

I had come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen. The first of these came as a terrible shock and, like anything that changes you forever, split my life into halves: Before and After. Like many of the extraordinary things to come, it involved my grandfather, Abraham Portman.

A vast lunar bog stretched away into the mist from either side of the path, just brown grass and tea-colored water as far as I could see, featureless but for the occasional mound of pile-up stones. It ended abruptly at a forest of skeletal trees, branches spindling up like the tips of wet paint brushes, and for a while the path became so lost beneath the fallen trunks and carpet of ivy that navigating it was a matter of faith.

And, grinning broadly at the look of horror on Uncle Vernon’s face, Harry set off toward the station exit, Hedwig rattling along in front of him, for what looked like a much better summer than the last.

The Blaudlaires bunched up together against the cold night air, and kept waving out the back window. The car drove farther and farther away, until Justice Strauss was merely a speck in the darkness, and it seemed to the children that they were moving in an aberrant—the word “aberrant” here meaning “very, very wrong, and causing much grief”—direction.