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Fictionista, Foodie, Feline-lover

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.

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