The Unicorn Dancer
Usually books about unicorns require that the female characters be virgins. They also decide that the best way to bring about tension about the female/unicorn relationship is to threaten her with rape constantly. Except there was this one book I read many years ago about a teenage boy virgin who was a post-apocalyptic samurai with a unicorn best friend and he chooses banging his girlfriend over his unicorn pal who walks away sadly into the sunset, but I digress. This book is refreshing in that while the unicorn prefers the company of women, he looks for traits other than an intact hymen when selecting who he will allow to ride him.
The Unicorn Dancer is pretty much adolescent teen girl wish fulfillment combined with a “EFF YOU SECONDARY CHARACTERS” attitude. The main character is Alorie, a pretty pretty princess who at first comes across as naive. Then one of her suitors kills her entire country minus herself at a party and shit gets real. She mostly rescues herself but is helped by a handsome man named Rowan, who belongs to a group of outcasts named Rovers. This marks him as the romantic interest and other than a bit of torture his fate is mostly safe. Basically the plot is that there’s an Evil Overlord that has been Sealed for Centuries and Alorie is the Prophesied Defender of the People who will put him down for good.
Time passes with the Rovers and Alorie begins to show that she is not as naive as first presented, she is observant and has a good head for politics. She also makes friends with a dwarf and an elf, who hate each other in that stereotypical “I read the Lord of the Rings too!” kinda way, but the elf is over the top fabulous and has antenna and I am inclined to look kindly on anything that ridicules elves. She also collects a ragtag band of misfits including the Big Dumb Brave Guy and the Mystic Bitchy Woman and some others who didn’t have strong enough personality traits. Now they have two choices, they can do what the Kindly Old Wizard has told them to do and go seek the unicorns, or they can go to this wall of infinite evil and have Alorie read the prophesy and then withdraw the Sword That Caused an Eon of Sorrow because that is always a great idea. Just to make sure that they’ll make the wrong choice, the Evil Overlord poses as the Kindly Old Wizard and tells Alorie to forget what he said about the unicorns and just go get the evil sword.
Along the way our ragtag band of misfits starts dropping like flies and also they are haunted by an evil black unicorn when, silly rabbit, unicorns are white. When they pull the sword, everyone who is left alive is given a role in the prophesy that only they could understand. This means that Mystic Bitchy Woman has a heart-to-heart bonding moment with Alorie and them immediately commits suicide so she can use her gift as an oracle to answer any questions they might have about their upcoming quest. They ask her the wrong question and she actually sighs, says they asked the wrong stupid question, and then wastes her time answering it anyway. She dies before they get any useful information and she later comes back as a zombie to no real effect whatsoever.
Finally they reforge the evil sword and go into battle against the Forces of Darkness. Big Dumb Brave Guy heads directly for the Evil Overlord and the sword is immediately shattered, along with the morale of their army. That’s when Alorie finally has the brilliant idea of finally looking for the unicorns. She makes her way into the conveniently-located-right-beside-the-battlefield Unicorn Forest and enters a glade. There she undergoes a dangerous dance with a white unicorn, grabs its horn and flips over its head to sit on his back. The description here really gets close to the line when it comes to implying that sexytimes are imminent, but instead the unicorn tells her to use his horn as the blade for the evil sword and then it won’t be evil anymore and she’ll be able to use it to kill or to heal. So then the unicorn’s horn falls off and he turns into a puddle of jelly and dies. The book ends with Alorie triumphantly wading into battle with her new hornsword, healing a secondary character on her way in.
Pretty standard stuff, right? Well, kinda. There’s some odd stuff going on with race in this book. At the beginning we are told a bit about the cosmology of this world, and how the world has the 7 True Races that were present when the world was made, and 3 Hidden Races who don’t talk to anyone, and some Made Races that wizards made. The 7 True Races start out as you would expect with elves and dwarfs and whatnot, but then you get Black Humans, White Humans, Red Humans, and Yellow Humans. Yeah, the book treats me and my neighbor as being as different as a dwarf and an elf. Weird. One of the made races are called Mutts and are pretty much dog furries who have been bred to be docile, harmless slaves. This doesn’t bother any of the main characters. But they are bothered when they run into a group of Mutts who are capable of violence, even though these Mutts are on their side. Again, very weird and the book doesn’t act like we’re supposed to find it weird at all.
There’s apparently a sequel to this book, which I guess goes into the actual killing of the Evil Overlord, the restoration of the Rovers, the return of the High King (who is totally going to be Rowan, I mean, duh) and Alorie’s restoration of her country (where everyone is dead) but I don’t think the story needed it. It promised dancing with unicorns and it delivered on that promise. Done.
