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Fictionista, Foodie, Feline-lover

Showing posts with label Chronicles of Narnia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chronicles of Narnia. Show all posts

Friday, April 21, 2017

Unicorn Books

Unicorns are suddenly everywhere, from Starbucks' color-changing drinks, to Coachella couture. I started thinking about unicorns and realized the only book about unicorns I could name was Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn. (The unicorn ponies of My Little Pony don't count.)

 I knew there had to be more so I turned, as I often to, to Good Reads, which did not disappoint with a list of 68 unicorn books.

I'm probably the only fantasy geek on the planet who never read The Chronicles of Narnia, so I didn't know that the seventh book in the series, The Last Battle, has unicorns. They're also in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the third book in Madeleine L'Engle's classic A Wrinkle in Time series. (I never warmed to that series either.)

But as I browsed the list, I found one I'd read and forgotten, Tanith Lee's Black Unicorn. Terru Brooks also wrote a unicorn book as part of his "Magic Kingdom" series but I find combinations of fantasy and  humor a bit hard to take. I don't mind comic relief, but I tend to like my fantasy taken seriously.

Writer Fuyumi Ono has an epic series ("The Twelve Kingdoms") that features unicorns heavily, and Mary Stanton has a multi-part Middle Grade series ("The Unicorns of Balinor") that sounds interesting. Other than that, I really wasn't tempted by what I saw on offer. but I kept Googling around and eventually I ran into Kathleen Duey's "Unicorn's Secret" books. Duey is a friend of a friend, and somewhere along the way, I'd read the first in the series, Moonsilver.  I went back and read it again and then I read on.

This series is a classic fantasy and very satisfying. It's also listed as MG (ages 7-10) but like the best fairy tales, it's timeless.