Sofía Vergara, Nick Loeb, and Solomon

From Acculturated:

Sofía Vergara and her ex, Nick Loeb, have two female embryos in a freezer somewhere. They had them made (awkward phrasing, I admit, but how else does one put it?) with the intention of having one or both of them implanted in a surrogate. But before they got that far, they split.... 

[Loeb] is suing her to make sure that she does not have the embryos destroyed. To Loeb, who believes that life begins at conception, destroying the embryos is tantamount to killing his unborn children. Now that Vergara is engaged to another man, he is worried about the fate of his girls.

“Who Could That Be at This Hour?” – a Review

First of all, Happy Birthday, Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket.

As a lover of sarcasm, black humor, and dry wit, Lemony Snicket’s books have always appealed to me. I loved A Series of Unfortunate Events, featuring the Baudelaire orphans and the wicked Count Olaf. Snicket's latest novel,“Who Could That Be at This Hour?” is in the same vein, and I wouldn’t give it any points on dramatic originality when compared to former work. Still, it’s plenty of fun.

 

Like ASOUE, in this, the first installment in the All the Wrong Questions series, we have a young protagonist who has to make his way in the world with little help from adults. The time period and location is ambiguous, sometimes feeling like the 1930s, sometimes like the modern day. There’s the same intriguing secret society that hovers around the edges of the tale, but never comes into full view. Lemony Snicket, who is the narrator and main character, loves books, hates coffee, and has had a very unusual education. He also has a female friend who never appears (for ASOUE fans, I suspect this might be the elusive Beatrice.)