The Last Unicorn

Peter Beagle's writing style is so evocative but by no means pretentious or purple. I immediately fell in love with his descriptions of this fantastical world that seamlessly blends the fairy tale and the contemporary to create a tale that feels both like a compelling allegory as well as a classic quest fantasy.

I grew up on a steady diet of fantasy books and movies, perhaps none so beloved as the 1982 classic The Last Unicorn. And it was my absolute love and childhood devotion to this movie that led to me putting off reading the book it was based on for so long.

Wow, was that a mistake.

I will never not love the movie, but the book is excellent and now just as beloved, a much deeper and moving story than the movie had the time to be. And the language of the book is just beautiful, so full of poetic… show more.

A unicorn believes she’s the last of her kind and undertakes a quest to find where the others have gone. This might be my favorite book!

It plays with the fantasy genre in a way that few books can. It seamlessly mixes the whimsical with the mundane and it gives us memorable characters who are unique twists on old tropes.

What I love most about this book is seeing life through the eyes of the unicorn protagonist. She’s a timeless creature—unaging, unchanging—who finds navigating a mortal world to be puzzling, inconvenient, and, at times, terrifying.

Can you imagine being immortal… show more.

This one is a literary classic to me. The characters are some of the quirkiest you would ever meet. The lovely streams and fields they pass by are often interrupted by some dark moments and weird encounters threatening to bring their journey to a stop. Don’t let the unicorn on the cover make you think this is for little kids. This is a tale about love, discovery, and growing through tough experiences.  

The fact that their destination is not the end of the journey brings me further into the story as we learn about the villain and the questionable choices… show more.

I loved this book so much, I pay homage to it in my own book, adopting the unicorn character, Amalthea, that Radia rides in the story.

Like Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Peter S. Beagle conjures a myth that seems to have originated from deep within our subconscious memories. But this is no plodding pseudo-history, no world-building treatise like so many fantasy writers strive to write these days. Thankfully, Beagle delivers fairy-tale storytelling in its purest form. The Last Unicorn brims with magic and adventure and heroics, but it’s also a kind of meta-fiction. Like The Princess Bride… show more.

This deceptively simple tale is the most beautiful book I’ve ever read, hands down. Somewhere in a lilac wood lives a unicorn—an immortal creature of goodness and light, indifferent to the struggles of men. While on a dangerous journey to learn why all others of her kind have vanished, the unicorn meets a bungling wizard who accidentally transforms her into a human woman. Hiding in plain sight of the evil king who hunts her, she falls in love with a prince and begins to forget her immortal identity. Readers are left to struggle with the question of whether it’s better… show more.

After my daughter was born, it occurred to me that there might be unicorns in my future, a whole room full of them, and I should get ready to talk about them in a fantastical “Dad knows all” type way by reading some unicorn stories. This is the first book I chose, and after getting immersed in both the story and art, I realized how compelling a unicorn character could be in an adult book. Years later, after publishing my first novel and deciding the next one would be dedicated to her, this story rose up in the back of… show more.