The Austere Academy

The Austere Academy is the fifth novel in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events book series. The novel continues the adventures of the three Baudelaire orphans as they are sent to a boarding school run by bizarre characters. At school, they befriend another pair of orphans whose parents died under similar circumstances and try to escape Count Olaf, the main antagonist of the series, who is disguised as a teacher. The book was published in 2000 and has received mostly positive reviews. The novel, along with the other books in the series, has been adapted into a Netflix television series of the same name.

Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are orphans who lost their parents in a mysterious house fire. Mr. Poe, the children’s guardian, takes them to a boarding school called Prufrock Preparatory School. The school’s motto is Memento Mori, which is Latin for “Remember You Will Die.” Upon entering the school, the Baudelaires are mocked by a rude girl named Carmelita Spats, who calls them “cakesniffers.” The children go to Vice Principal Nero’s office. Nero, who is very arrogant, welcomes them to the school and explains that the academy’s advanced computer system will help keep Count Olaf, the children’s devious enemy, far away from them. Nero then tells the children that they will be living in the Orphans’ Shack because they do not have parental permission to sleep in the dormitories. Since baby Sunny is too young to attend classes, she will be working for the school as a secretary. The Baudelaires find the Orphans’ Shack in dilapidated condition, with fungus on the ceiling, old wallpaper on the walls, and crabs crawling all over the floor. They also learn about Nero’s strange rules for the students at the school – all students are required to listen to Nero play the violin for six hours every day. For every day they are absent, they must buy Nero a bag of candy and watch him eat it.

When the children go to lunch, Carmelita mocks them again. They share a table with another pair of orphans named Duncan and Isadora Quagmire, whose parents and brother, Quigley, also died in a house fire. Like the Baudelaires, they were also left a large fortune by their parents. The Quagmires write down all their observations in notebooks. Violet and Klaus attend class and meet their teachers. Violet’s teacher, Mr. Remora, tells boring stories while eating a lot of bananas. Klaus’s teacher, Mrs. Bass, is in love with the metric system and forces the students to measure all kinds of mundane objects. The Baudelaires later meet Coach Genghis, the gym teacher, whom they recognize immediately as Count Olaf in disguise. However, they pretend to be ignorant of Genghis’s real identity and say nothing in his class. They later go to Nero’s office to warn him about Count Olaf, but are thwarted by Genghis, who visits the office at the very same time.



Carmelita delivers a message to the Baudelaires that the Coach wants them to meet him on the athletic field at sundown, the same time that they are scheduled to go to the auditorium to listen to Nero’s violin recital. When the children show up to the field, Genghis forces Violet and Klaus to paint a circle on the ground and run laps around it, which he refers to as “Special Orphan Running Exercises,” or S.O.R.E., while Sunny watches. Genghis makes Violet and Klaus go back to the field and run laps every day for nine days. As a result, the children begin failing their exams due to exhaustion. Meanwhile, Sunny is failing at her secretarial work because she runs out of staples. The Baudelaires are told that Violet and Klaus must pass their next exam and Sunny must staple paper correctly with homemade staples or they will be expelled from the academy and homeschooled by Coach Genghis.

After they learn of their friends’ predicament, Duncan and Isadora offer to run laps in Violet and Klaus’s place, while a sack of flour is disguised as Sunny. Genghis does not realize that Duncan and Isadora have taken the Baudelaires’ places since it is too dark out to see them clearly. While the Quagmires run laps, Violet and Klaus study for the exam and Violet invents a device to make staples so that Sunny would have something with which to staple. Nero, Mr. Remora, and Mrs. Bass come to the Orphans’ Shack and administer the exam to Violet and Klaus, who pass with flying colors. They also ask Sunny to staple some stacks of papers with Violet’s homemade staples, which she does. The children owe Nero twenty-seven bags of candy for the nine days that they missed his concerts and must also give Carmelita an earring for every message that she delivered to them.

Just as Mr. Poe arrives with the bags of candy and earrings, however, Genghis comes to the shack and tells Nero that the Baudelaires cheated on their punishment; while trying to kick Sunny, Genghis realized that a sack of flour had been substituted in her place. The children tell Nero and Mr. Poe that Genghis is really Count Olaf in disguise, but Nero does not believe them and still expels them. The children remove Genghis’s head turban, which he said he wore for religious reasons, and see Olaf’s distinctive unibrow underneath. Genghis runs from the shack and sheds his disguise, revealing himself to be Count Olaf. His two assistants, who were masquerading as lunch ladies, kidnap Duncan and Isadora and shove them into a car. The Quagmires shout “Look in the notebooks! V.F.D.!” out the car window to the Baudelaires. Unfortunately, however, Count Olaf steals the Quagmires’ notebooks and the car drives away. The main themes of the novel are luck and misfortune, friendship, mystery, resourcefulness, and overcoming adversity. The Baudelaires form a friendship with the Quagmire orphans, who will prove to be important to them later in the series. They also use their wits once again to escape the clutches of Count Olaf, who is trying to win guardianship of them so that he may obtain their parents’ fortune.