I love unicorns. I hope I won’t have to defend that position in the year of our lord 2024. It’s an extra sparkly horse with a horn. What’s not to like? It should surprise no one, then, that I expected to really enjoy The Last Unicorn.

I had heard of this book, but I hadn’t really heard anything about it. I just knew that there was a classic novel about a unicorn. In a way it makes sense, because I find this book very hard to describe.

The start of this book was very confusing. It’s very much a fairy tale, and the first couple of chapters feature some very florid language that, for me, was very hard to comprehend. I had to reread sentences a couple of times to even understand what was going on, and even then that didn’t always help. It gets better eventually, but I unfortunately was never truly dazzled in the way Patrick Rothfuss said I would be in the introduction. This book just didn’t feel groundbreaking.

What I do really like is how the unicorn is, essentially, a complicated woman. Like, I’ve read much longer fantasy novels that really want to be feminist, whose women have less depth of character than this one sad unicorn.

I think this definitely a fun book to read to children, and I don’t resent having read it at all. However, I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s one of those children’s books I would recommend to adults.