This book is an enjoyable read. It was simple and to the point. The second book in this series is much better though. This book is about a girl named Tanaquil that sets off after a black unicorn that takes her to new places and a great adventure. There she learns many things about life, the unicorn and herself.
Well-written as is just about anything by Tanith Lee, peopled with beings who are mysterious and OTHER, this is a somewhat different type of unicorn fantasy. No sweet-tempered pearly-white horned horses with a penchant for virgins here!
Inside illustrations by fantasy artist Heather Cooper.
From back cover: It was big and beautiful and so black that it was like a hole in space, and it was completely impossible. Unicorns didn't belong in this world except in legends. But there it stood, radiating magical power, in the shattered wreck of the party. Nobody knew where it had come from, or what it wanted. Not even Jaive, the sorceress, could fathom the mystery of the fabled beast. But Tanaquil, Jaive's completely unmagical daughter, understood it at once. She knew why the unicorn was there: It had come for her. It needed her. Yet she was the girl with no talent for magic. She could only fiddle with broken bits of machinery and make them work again. What could she do for a unicorn?
I think I would have liked this book better had I read it a long time ago. I could barely keep my attention on the book and had to force myself to sit down to read.
In the end, I think it's a cute book and very appropriate for a young person to start off reading should they decide they want to try fantasy novels.
I will say that I loved the little peeve. He was cute!
A cute fantasy story about a young girl named Tanaquil who assembles the bones of a unicorn, which then springs to life. She then joins the unicorn on a wild adventure. This book was an enjoyable read, and easy too.
Tanaquil is the daughter of a sorceress, but she has no magical abilities herself. However, she can fix things, so in order to occupy her mind and her days, she fixes broken things brought to her by the residents of the desert fortress where she lives. The monotony of her existence shifts when she befriends a peeve who helps her put together the skeleton of a unicorn. The adventure that follows eventually leads Tanaquil to her destiny.
I haven't read any of Tanith Lee's other novels, but if this is an example of her work, I look forward to the rest. The book is short, but even so, Lee is able to flesh out characters and locations enough to connect them with the reader. She has left the ending open for sequels, which have been written (Gold Unicorn, Red Unicorn), so I will seek those out first.
