From the Publisher: As the three Baudelaire orphans warily approach their new home Prufrock Preparatory School : they can't help but notice the enormous stone arch bearing the school's motto Memento Mori or "Remember you will die." This is not a cheerful greeting and certainly marks an inauspicious beginning to a very bleak story just as we have come to expect from Lemony Snickett's Series of Unfortunate Events, the deliciously morbid set of books...

Under a new government program based on the saying "It takes a village to raise a child," the Baudelaire orphans are adopted by an entire town, with disastrous results.