The Last Unicorn

Installment #5 in the Book Reviews for Melanie series.

Also a book review for The 48-Hour Book Challenge, though I began editing the review earlier. Obviously I'll only count the time I spent on it during the Challenge!


The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
Read: 12/2/11-12/4/11

The Last Unicorn is so beautiful it hurts. It's a perfect little gem of a book. (And I love the cartoon, too, which if I'm recalling correctly I actually saw before the book. In some ways, contrary to more purist ideas and my own inclination, movies before books can be a good order, because it seems it can lead more often to loving both. And wow, the cartoon is cheap right now, I should get it...)

I need to read it again. I can't do it justice here, otherwise. Reading it again is no great sacrifice. I would do it before writing this review, but I'm attempting to write my reviews much faster, and will accept no excuses delaying any of them. So, bother.

Obviously I must read it again at some point, though, if not right this instant. Not only would I want to because the book is good, but Patrick Rothfuss says I should read it again. It's right there. On the cover.

Speaking of Patrick Rothfuss, as one can tell from the cover, he, um, very very much likes it. He talks about it a lot, but this is one of my favorites that I could find... language warning, but... yeah. The part at the top, before he gets to Tad Williams, though the whole thing is good.

Oh, one other thing. So beautiful it hurts, sure. But... there's humor, whimsy, silliness, too. It's not all dignified or quite what you would expect. It's an odd blend, but again, pretty much perfect.

I mean, the incompetent magician is named Schmendrick. Yeah. It's hard to be very dignified with a name like that. And he pretty much is the incompetent magician, the standard by whom all others shall be judged. In the words of my edition's generic blurb, "...a kind of poor man's Merlin whose devotion to the exquisite creature he follows is exceeded only by his mediocrity in magic."

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful book.


"'How can it be?' she wondered. 'I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorn [sic] or if they had changed so that they hated all unicorns now and tried to kill them when they saw them. But not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else--what do they look like to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children?'

"Sometimes she thought, 'If men no longer know what they are looking at, there may well be unicorns in the world yet, unknown and glad of it.' But she knew beyond both hope and vanity that men had changed, and the world with them, because the unicorns were gone. Yet she went on along the hard road, although each day she wished a little more that she had never left her forest."


"'It's a rare man who is taken for what he truly is,' he said. 'There is much misjudgment in the world. Now I knew you for a unicorn when I first saw you, and I know that I am your friend. Yet you take me for a clown, or a clod, or a betrayer, and so must I be if you see me so. The magic on you is only magic and will vanish as soon as you are free, but the enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes. We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream. Still I have read, or heard it sung, that uncorns [sic] when time was young, could tell the difference 'twixt the two--the false shining and the true, the lips' laugh and the heart's rue.'"

And on a smaller scale, a good representative phrase I noticed and loved: "When Schmendrick looked at her again he had managed to pull his face together, but it was still struggling to escape from him."

The rest of what I'm going to quote is scented faintly of spoilers, so to those who are sensitive to those strains, read no further. They are so good (and so sideways to any true spoilers) that I can't help myself. I quote on, for the beautiful, beautiful themes.


"'Fools, fools and children! It was a lie, like all magic! There is no such person as Robin Hood!' But the outlaws, wild with loss, went crashing into the woods after the shining archers, stumbling over logs, falling through thorn bushes, wailing hungrily as they ran.

"Only Molly Grue stopped and looked back. Her face was burning white.

"'Nay, Cully, you have it backward,' she called to him. 'There's no such a person as you, or me, or any of us. Robin and Marian are real, and we are the legend!'"


"'The hero has to make a prophecy come true, and the villain is the one who has to stop him--though in another kind of story, it's more often the other way around. And a hero has to be in trouble from the moment of his birth, or he's not a real hero. It's a great relief to find out about Prince Lír. I've been waiting for this tale to turn up a leading man.'

"The unicorn was there as a star is suddenly there, moving a little way ahead of them, a sail in the dark. Molly said, 'If Lír is the hero, what is she?'

"'That's different. Haggard and Lír and Drinn and you and I--we are in a fairy tale, and must go where it goes. But she is real. She is real.'"


"'...How can anything that is going to die be real? How can it be truly beautiful?'...

"'I was born mortal, and I have been immortal for a long, foolish time, and one day I will be mortal again; so I know something that a unicorn cannot know. Whatever can die is beautiful--more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world.'"


There. It's alright, you can come out now. I'm done.

Book of Enchantments

I didn't give many Christmas presents this year. At least, not yet. And by "many" I mean "more than one." See, there was this baby...

But my sister Melanie had a present on her wish list that I just couldn't resist. She said she had so many books available to read, especially on our family's Kindle account, that she'd like someone to give her the gift of time by reviewing some of those Kindle books, or other favorites of theirs; helping her to decide which ones to read. So I sent her a long list of books I've been meaning to review, and she told me which ones she hadn't read.

I didn't promise many, or well, any, really. I didn't want to make a promise I can't keep, and being a new mother, I'm pretty unsure about how much I could possibly promise and keep. But I'm going to aim to review a couple books every month for this whole year. I'm looking forward to telling you what to read, Melanie!

Maybe occasionally I'll also review something she has read, a couple of those books on my sidebar. Be nice for that to-review list to stop growing longer and longer and longer...

Melanie, I hope you don't have too hard of a time obtaining copies of the books I review. Many of them may not be on the Kindle account, so I may not help you much with selecting books there after all... meh.

I'm going to start the series out with an easy one, a review that I'd drafted which had moldered away on here without getting posted for no apparent reason. Last date I edited it was 10/5/10, that may be when I wrote most of it. Melanie, enjoy! And the rest of you, too!


Book of Enchantments by Patricia C. Wrede
Read: 7/29/10-8/26/10
Click here for my sister Sondy's review

If you like Patricia C. Wrede (and why wouldn't you?) I recommend picking up this collection of short stories sometime. If you've never read any of her books, I suggest starting with Dealing with Dragons, although you don't have to, and although I haven't read all her books, so I don't say that with complete authority. It's just that there were a few stories in the collection I wasn't crazy about, which makes Dealing with Dragons of a higher consistent quality. And there was a story about the Enchanted Forest characters which "spoils" who ends up with who. I put it in quotation marks because it's one of those obvious pairings, and the suspense in that respect isn't what makes the stories.

Book of Enchantments was copyright 1996. There are ten stories from rather various sources, conveniently detailed in Notes from the Author at the back. The original stories range all the way from 1981 up to the one story written for the collection, which I'm guessing, even if the publishing process was long (well, of course, it would be, it always is), would have been written in 1995 at the earliest. She talks about them in the order she wrote them rather than the order they're presented in the book -- it isn't the same order, although there are rough similarities. Swap a couple of the middle ones, move the oldest story in between them, move one of the newer ones towards the start, and you're all good. But anyway.

Four of the stories were written for anthologies -- a Liavek "shared world" anthology, a unicorn anthology put together by Bruce Coville, a Witch World anthology and a werewolf anthology put together by Jane Yolen, although it didn't end up making the cut for reasons of a humorous story not fitting with the tone. Oddly enough, of those four stories, only the Witch World one, "The Sword-Seller," felt very unlike Wrede's normal style. It was more dramatic and less humorous than her norm, but still good. I wouldn't pick up the book just for that one, but nonetheless, likable. On the other hand, out of the six stories not written for anthologies, maybe as many as four of them felt a little un-Wrede-like to me. Obviously I am not familiar with all the styles of Wrede. And I know, she is allowed to do dramatic and not just humorous. But I think I would prefer longer work for her dramatic, novels instead. Still, I guess some of the dramatic stories with nice premises or twists worked quite well. "Stronger Than Time" was a great Sleeping Beauty twist. But then, maybe because it was connected to a fairy tale, it was one of the ones that felt Wrede-like to me, despite not being laugh-out-loud funny. Meh. I'm so putting her in a box. Sorry, Patricia C. Wrede!

My favorites were the ones that felt totally like her to me -- "Rikiki and the Wizard," "The Princess, the Cat, and the Unicorn," and "Utensile Strength." Probably in fourth would be "The Sixty-Two Curses of Caliph Arenschadd." These stories were awesome.

"Rikiki and the Wizard" was the one I mentioned earlier was written for a Liavek anthology, which is why its subtitle is "A S'Rian Folk Story" -- I never would have guessed that the blue chipmunk god in this story was not Wrede's own creation, but no, she says in the Notes, "I had spent a good portion of one morning reading a book of American Indian folktales and had started wondering what sort of folk stories the Liavekans might tell each other, particularly about their not-too-bright chipmunk god, Rikiki."  Who would have thought someone else would have thought of such a thing?  At any rate, the story was hilarious. I ended up starting to read portions aloud to others in the room, but then going back and reading the tiny bit at the beginning I'd skipped and then reading the whole thing aloud. It was good.

It's more obviously understandable why I recognize and love the style in "The Princess, the Cat, and the Unicorn" and "Utensile Strength," as they're both set in the Enchanted Forest. The first was another read-aloud good one -- the cat of the title is so wonderfully cat-like ("'How would you like to have your tail stepped on?' 'I don't have a tail,' Elyssa said, considerably startled. 'And if you hadn't been lying in front of me, I wouldn't have stepped on you.' 'Cat's privilege,' said the cat, and began furiously washing his injured tail.'"), the unicorn is... well, to quote the Notes,

"Naturally, Enchanted Forest unicorns would be beautiful and magical and intelligent—but, being intelligent, they would certainly know just how beautiful and magical they were, and would expect to be treated accordingly..." ("'Gracious!' Elyssa said. 'Yes I am, aren't I?' said the unicorn complacently.')

And as for "The Princess" part of the title, I think I shall simply quote again, from the beginning of the story, this time. That seems best and most enjoyable.

"Princess Elyssa and her sisters lived in the tiny, comfortable kingdom of Oslett, where nothing ever seemed to go quite the way it was supposed to. The castle garden grew splendid dandelions, but refused to produce either columbine or deadly nightshade. The magic carpet had a bad case of moths and the King's prized seven-league boots only went five-and-a-half leagues at a step (six leagues, with a good tailwind).

There were, of course, compensations. None of the fairies lived close enough to come to the Princesses' christenings (though they were all most carefully invited) so there were no evil enchantments laid on any of the three Princesses. The King's second wife was neither a wicked witch nor an ogress, but a plump, motherly woman who was very fond of her stepdaughters. And the only giant in the neighborhood was a kind and elderly Frost Giant who was always invited to the castle during the hottest part of the summer (his presence cooled things off wonderfully, and he rather liked being useful).

The King's councillors, however, complained bitterly about the situation. They felt it was beneath their dignity to run a kingdom where nothing ever behaved quite as it should. They grumbled about the moths and dandelions, muttered about the five-and-a-half-league boots, and remonstrated with the Queen and the three Princesses about their duties...

'It's all very well for a middle Princess to be ordinary,' the chief of the King's councillors told her in exasperation. 'But this is going too far!'...

But the councillors refused to give up. They badgered and pestered and hounded poor Elyssa until she simply could not bear it anymore. Finally she went to her stepmother, the Queen, and complained.

'Hmmph,' said the Queen. 'They're being ridiculous, as usual. I could have your father talk to them, if you wish.'

'It won't do any good,' Elyssa said.

'You're probably right,' the Queen agreed, and they sat for a moment in gloomy silence.

'I wish I could just run off to seek my fortune,' Elyssa said with a sigh.

Her stepmother straightened up suddenly. 'Of course!  The very thing. Why didn't I think of that?'

'But I'm the middle Princess,' Elyssa said. 'It's youngest Princesses who go off to seek their fortunes.'

'You've been listening to those councillors too much,' the Queen said. 'They won't like it, of course, but that will be good for them.' The Queen was not at all fond of the councillors because they kept trying to persuade her to turn her stepdaughters into swans or throw them out of the castle while the King was away."


And as for "Utensile Strength," well, it's a story about the Frying Pan of Doom. Need I say more?  No, but you can count on me wanting to. I mean, it's just so quotable.

"'And Mother says it was her best frying pan and now she's going to have to start all over breaking in a new one, because you can't cook chicken in the Frying Pan of Doom. It just wouldn't be right.'"

"'Heroes want a weapon that sounds heroic and magical—the Thunder Mace or the Sword of Stars—not the Frying Pan of Doom. And on top of that... Well, here, try to touch it. But be careful.'

Gingerly, Daystar reached out and touched the side of the pan. 'Ow!  It's hot!'

Tamriff nodded. 'Nobody can pick it up unless they're wearing an oven mitt. And no hero wants to go into battle wearing an oven mitt and swinging a frying pan—or at least, none of the fifty-seven heroes Father has checked with so far.'"


Heh heh.

The Garden Behind the Moon

The Garden Behind the Moon by Howard Pyle

Read: 5/14/10

LibraryThing tags, if I had put this on LibraryThing: Children's, Fantasy, Fairy Tale, Victorian

I tag it as a fairy tale not because it's a traditional one, but because it has all the elements.

This is a more charming and less adventurous book than Howard Pyle's usual fare, I believe. Not that there isn't any adventure; it's just not The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. It's a little reminiscent of George MacDonald -- Pyle was born only about thirty years after MacDonald, and it looks like he started writing (or publishing) about thirty years after MacDonald did, too. So roughly the same period, and "one of the late nineteenth-century writers who helped invent the fairy tale novel," as Jane Yolen put it (quoted on the back cover of my library copy), so it's not particularly surprising one would remind me of the other. Yay!

Now let's see if I can remember all the adjectives I was thinking of when I first finished the book. Hmm. Charming, I already mentioned that one. Beautiful, sad, and oh bother, one I could remember just yesterday, gaaah... I think it basically meant beautiful and sad (but not tragic!) at the same time, but still, the connotation is so much better than if you just use the two words... it started with an "m"... gaah. Delightful. No, it's not the word I'm looking for, but I think it was still one of the original adjectives. Sort of picturesque... Ah well. Someday I'm going to buy this book, a nice edition with all the original illustrations.

From the Foreword: "When you look out across the water at night, after the sun has set and the moon has risen high enough to become bright, then you see a long, glimmering moon-path reaching away into the distance. There it lies, stretching from the moon to the earth, and from the earth to the moon, as bright as silver and gold, and as straight and smooth as a turnpike road...

It looks like a path, and that is what it really is, for if you only know how to do so, you may walk upon it just as easily as you may walk upon a barn floor. All you need to do is to make a beginning, and there you are. After that it is smooth enough walking, and you may skip and play and romp as you choose. Then you may come and go whenever you have a mind to, and if you will take my word for it, it is the most beautiful and wonderful road that a body can travel betwixt here and the land that so few folk ever go to and come back again.

For the moon-path leads straight to the moon. That was why it was built -- that a body might go from the brown earth to the moon, and maybe back again.

But why, you may ask, should anybody want to go to the moon? That I will tell you. The reason is that behind the moon there lies the most wonderful, beautiful, never-to-be-forgotten garden that the mind can think of. In it live little children who play and romp, and laugh and sing, and are as merry and happy as the little white lambs in the green meadow in springtime. There they never have trouble and worry; they never dispute nor quarrel; they never are sorry and never cry.

Aye, aye; -- that beautiful garden. One time I myself saw it -- though in a dream -- dim and indistinct, as one might see such a beautiful place through a piece of crooked glass. In it was the little boy whom I loved the best of all. He did not see me, but I saw him, and I think I was looking into the garden out of one of the moon-windows. I was glad to see him, for he had gone out along the moon-path, and he had not come back again."

And from the end of the book (but without any spoilers, don't worry!): "Well, you may smile at this story if you choose, and call it all moonshine, but if you do not believe by this time that there is more in moonshine than the glimmer and the whiteness, why, I could not make you believe it if I were to write a hundred and twenty-seven great books instead of this short story."

Heart's Blood

Heart's Blood by Juliet Marillier
Read: 1/7/10-1/27/10 (but only in about three sittings -- around 50 pages one day, the rest of it a few weeks later)
LibraryThing tags, if I had put this on LibraryThing: Fantasy, Romance, Fairy Tale, Historical Fiction, Ireland, Medieval, Family, Fear... and a couple other tags I won't include this time just in case it'd spoil things for a couple of you.

Perhaps the best way to introduce this book is with the author's own words (I will link to it only with the warning that the page includes spoilers, but I don't think the part I've copied here really spoils anything, unless you just don't want to know what a book is about at all before you read it, in which case, why are you here?):

"Beauty and the Beast has always been one of my favourite fairy tales, and readers will recognise the bones of it in Heart’s Blood: a mysterious house with an alienated, disfigured master, a priceless plant growing in a forbidden garden, magic mirrors and unusual household retainers. The story of my novel has the same general shape as that of Beauty and the Beast.

However, this is far from a fairy tale retelling. It’s not even a close reinterpretation of the traditional tale. Heart’s Blood is a love story, a... [Marcy just now realized one of the descriptions she uses could be a big spoiler to the right kind of brain and cut it] ...a family saga, a story about people overcoming their difficulties, and a little slice of Irish history, as well as a homage to a favourite fairy tale."

Aside from the magic mirrors and one other spoiler aspect, there isn't a great deal of the fantastic in this book, especially when one has "Beauty and the Beast" in mind while reading it. It had a gothic feel to me (although I'm not widely read in gothic literature), even more so than some of the traditional retellings, which seems a little odd now that I think of it. I suppose when there's already a beast in an isolated castle you don't want to make the tale too dark, or the happy ending begins to feel implausible. And I suppose it made particular sense for Heart's Blood, because one of the main themes concerns facing your fears, so a dark, frightening mood lends itself to the theme.

And now you're going to think it's horror or something. Not so much. It's fantasy, romance, and historical fiction; in that order, I think. Maybe more romance than fantasy, but not enough that you would ever want to shelve it there. Heavens, no. For starters, fantasy readers don't like going into the romance section, whereas the reverse is not true. Romance is one of those things... any genre can have a pretty huge dose of it without necessarily offending its readership or moving it in the bookstore. Anywho.

As for the historical fiction, it's set in western Ireland, Connacht, in the twelfth century. Dang it, I started a new paragraph, but that's really all I have to say about that. Huh. I mean, I could say more about the period, but I don't really need to for my purposes, and I'd risk spoilers. So meh. You can read more about it (on the author's page, or elsewhere) after you finish the book.

I didn't like it quite as much as some of her other books, but that isn't saying much, as Daughter of the Forest and Wildwood Dancing are among my favorites. I'm not quite sure why I didn't like it as much. It was certainly well written and enjoyable. It just didn't have that extra something those two did, to flabbergast and amaze me. Maybe the themes and characters didn't speak to me as much? And yet, I did like and relate to them; the hero not as much as other characters, perhaps, maybe that's it. Maybe I stayed too busy thinking about the book instead of living it. I'm really not sure. It was very good. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if other readers fell in love with it.

The Little Lame Prince

The Little Lame Prince by Dinah Mulock Craik, illustrated by Hope Dunlap
Read: 5/17/09-5/20/09
LibraryThing tags: Fairy Tale, Fantasy, Children's, Victorian

Cute story. You should read it. Mmm. 103 pages of original fairy taleness... It probably would have been even better if I had read it when I was a little kid, but that cannot be helped.

Daughter of the Forest

Daughter of the Forest (The Sevenwaters Trilogy #1) by Juliet Marillier
Read: 7/1/08-7/3/08
LibraryThing tags: Fantasy, Fairy Tale, Romance, Historical Fiction, Ireland, Medieval

Doesn't this list of tags just make your mouth water? No? Hmph. You're weird.

I can't tell you one of my favorite things about this book, because premise or not, it's not something you find out for sure until over a hundred pages in. So you'll just have to take my word for it, I guess. It's good, read it. One of my favorites, now. The prose is wonderful. Despite its length (544 pages), it feels very polished, crafted and magical.

Book of a Thousand Days

Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale

Good book, good book (happy dance)! Inspired by the fairy tale "Maid Maleen" and medieval Mongolia (kept making me think of a couple things I'd read of Kazakhstan for one of my classes), I think this is my favorite of Shannon Hale's YA since Goose Girl. They both appeal to my desire to be known, understood and protected without having to tell people whatever it is I want known directly to their face. Yes, that's kind of an unhealthy desire. But, even in its perversion, I think it provides a glimpse of God's understanding of us, so far beyond what we could ever tell Him. Maybe that's why it seems so romantic and lovely in story form. And it's not like the main character in either story could have solved all the problems by herself with better active communication (or at least, she couldn't know that she could), or like either of them were particularly passive and helpless -- I only mention it and say it's an unhealthy desire because, as another book reminded me, I can forget that my husband can't magically read my mind, and that I shouldn't love him any less for that. But in relation to God, it makes a lot of sense. And our romance here on earth often mirrors that, albeit dimly. Every so often we understand each other better than we understand ourselves...

"Oh Master, grant that I may never seek...
...to be understood, as to understand..."