The Last Unicorn

by Peter S. Beagle, 212 pages

A majestic, immortal unicorn has not seen or heard of another of her kind for a generation of men. After an unsettling encounter with a deferential, manic, quote-spouting butterfly, she begins to fear that she is alone. Without a plan, she leaves the security of her familiar woods to venture out into the world and learn the fate of her people. Accompanied by a twopenny magician and a rough-edged camp cook she unintentionally draws into her wake, she will also learn a little of what it means to be mortal, to know fear, pain, death, regret...and love.

I love this book. I sat down to write this review and instead wasted a few hours re-reading passages and smiling to myself and coveting my own copy and not writing anything. The language is beautiful and fluid, somber and silly, and I could live in it all day. Beagle's unique, organic way with words reminds me of a less dark and distant Neil Gaiman (whose own, lovely Stardust trails wispy echoes of this older story for me) or Diana Wynne Jones (imagination-blessed author of Howl's Moving Castle). Beagle creates these wonderful, deep characters but doesn't always tell you what's under the surface, instead letting you catch glimpses of who they really are in a glance, a cut-off sentence, a silent action lost in the tumult a few seconds later. The details and characterization he successfully encourages your imagination to supply would double the slender book's length if written out on the page, but he teaches you to create that substance out of thin air and you happily comply before you even realize what you're doing.

Melancholic, yet cheerfully optimistic; bittersweet, yet snicker-inducing. Quite a few snickers, actually. And awe. I want to read more Beagle. I want to know what tangles Schmendrick and Molly get into in the future. (Isn't Schmendrick just a wonderful name for a bungling magician with his heart in the right place? And Molly Grue sounds like she's just stepped out of the taproom to clobber someone over the head with a tray. And then there's Haggard...and Amalthea...and Lír.... All the names are perfect, really.) There are talking cats and bluejays, castles and curses, witches and harpies, spells and princes, and beautiful, beautiful words. If you like fantasy at all, read this book. If you've seen the 1982 animated film adaptation and thought it was a little incongruously dark and cartoony (which I did in 4th grade--I should watch it again now as a "grown up"), read this book and let your brain replace the images with your own interpretation (as I wish I'd done years ago). I was reminded that this existed when I saw that a new graphic novel version had been published, which I'd also like to read, but thought it'd be best to read the original first. I'm so glad I did, as it has given me a new author crush and set me off on another bibliography-consuming mission.

*sigh*