The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle

Information

Goodreads: The Last Unicorn
Series: The Last Unicorn #1
Source: Purchased
Published: 1968

Summary

A unicorn discovers that she is the last of her kind and so sets forth on a quest to find the others.  Along the way she is joined by Schmendrick, an inept magician, and Molly Grue, a woman who still believes in beauty despite her hard life.  Their journey leads them to the cursed castle of King Haggard, where dwells the fearsome Red Bull who once drove all the other unicorns away.  But more than monsters lurk in Haggard’s halls.  Once the unicorn enters, she, unchanging and immortal, will never be the same again.

Review

The Last Unicorn is one of those rare, beautiful books equally full of wonder and sadness.  From the first sentence, where the unicorn lives all alone in a lilac wood, you know this book is going to break your heart.  The beauty of the language and the story, however, are enough to make you want to read on anyway, no matter the emotional cost.

I always find it more difficult to review a book I loved than one I disliked or merely liked.  Finding the words to describe the rare, exquisite beauty of some stories can seem forced or cheap, or simply overused.  After all, can simply repeating “beautiful” really convey the specialness of some stories?  I suspect that those who read those stories and agreed will understand, and perhaps that is the best one can hope for sometimes.

I could go on about the way The Last Unicorn uses and plays with fairy tale tropes, the way it somehow still seems to believe in goodness and beauty even when it seems somewhat despairing.  The characters alone no doubt could provide material for a lengthy analysis.  And yet, I think this time, I would rather not.  Some stories strike too deeply for me to want to talk about them or analyze them, at least at first.  They just want to be held for awhile, and cherished.

So, if you are a lover of fantasy and you have not yet read The Last Unicorn, I simply urge you to give it a try.  There’s a reason it’s considered a classic in its genre.  A reason, perhaps, that borders on the ineffable.