by Peter S. Beagle (1939)
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Imagine the moonlit glade where a unicorn stands motionless, her horn catching starlight like a shard of forgotten dreams, and in that hush, she hears the world’s silence screaming her solitude. That’s the ache that pulls you into The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle’s 1968 wonder, where magic isn’t fireworks but a fragile whisper against the grind of time.
You follow her—the Unicorn, unnamed at first, pure and eternal—on a quest sparked by a butterfly’s cruel rumor: she’s the last of her kind. She slips from her enchanted wood into a carnival of wonders and woes, falling in with Schmendrick the bumbling magician, whose spells fizzle like damp fireworks until they don’t, and Molly Grue, the kitchen-worn woman whose weary eyes see truth where others chase illusions. Their road winds through shadowed forests alive with harpies’ mocking songs, a clock that devours time, and the skull of a prince who laughs at death. Beagle paints these scenes with prose so lyrical it hums in your veins—feel the Unicorn’s terror as the Red Bull charges, a crimson engine of oblivion that herds her kind into the sea; taste the salt of her transformation into the girl Amalthea, her immortality traded for fragile human longing, her white hide scarred by mortal fears.
What sets this apart from the sword-clashing epics or dragon-slaying romps? It’s a fairy tale for grown souls, threading whimsy with the blade of loss. No heroes topple empires here; instead, you confront mortality’s quiet theft—the way King Haggard’s castle perches on a cliff like a thief’s hoard, his eyes gleaming with a greed that devours joy. Schmendrick’s fumbling magic mirrors our own stumbles toward meaning, and Molly’s raw honesty—“We are all unicorns, but most of us have forgotten”—cuts deeper than any spell. It’s bittersweet, that rush of awe laced with dread, like chasing fireflies at dusk knowing dawn will scatter them.
If you loved the aching beauty of The Ocean at the End of the Lane or the gentle heartbreak in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, this is your book—the one that lingers like a half-remembered song.
Tonight, let the Unicorn’s hoofbeats echo in your chest; open it, and chase the lost with her before the Bull finds you first.
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