I have to tell you, I'm not a big fan of Unicorns. I might have a book about the last one, and I might have an adorable unicorn figure, but the way unicorns are described these days isn't something I like. They are supposed to be beautiful, graceful, magical, better than anything on earth, disgusted by humans and entranced by time as it passes them by. They are supposed to be perfect. Perfection is BORING. Nothing happens when everything is perfect. (Which is why as a child, I decided satanism and thoughts of simply killing myself was the way to go. Why go to heaven, where everything is perfect? Let's go to hell! ROCK AND ROLL!!! Aw, children. )
In The Last Unicorn, the book begins this way: everything is good, the unicorn is content in her forest, she knows she is beautiful, and la di da. Yet then an incident occurs and she is left wondering where all the other unicorns are. She becomes restless. Thus, her quest begins! Where are all the other unicorns? I must find them!
I haven't seen the movie, and I would like to, but I don't see how they can get across the amazing detail the book describes with sentences like, "Outside, the night lay coiled in the street, cobra-cold and scaled with stars." Unless there is some narrator just so there is not the loss of the greatest part of the book. The metaphors, the similes... It is hard not to go through the book and pick them out and type them here for you.
When the unicorn is caged for 16 hours of her life, the bars whisper evilly, and the lock laughs at her demise. During her hardships, she can feel time raking at her body for the first time in her life, she can feel herself dying though she is immortal. She thinks things no other unicorns have had the need to think of, and she loves when no other unicorn has ever loved. She forgets that she is a unicorn. She feels pain. It is not perfect, therefore is it perfect.
The story itself is very original, it takes elements from fairy tales, and characters talk about how to reach the happy ending. They talk about heroes, and what each of them are looking for. I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone, hoping that each who reads this book can see it for what it is: simply amazing.
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