Into the Land of the Unicorns

Bruce Coville's Into the Land of the Unicorns is a fantasy adventure for 8 year olds about a girl who jumps off a church tower on the twelfth stroke of a bell.

What happens

It starts on a snowy evening with the streets full of last-minute shoppers. Cara asks her grandmother if the man behind them is following them. She expects to be told not to be silly. Instead Grandmother Morris grips her hand and starts walking very fast.

They hide in a church. Grandmother hangs her precious locket round Cara's neck (it holds a coil of white hair from a unicorn's mane, apparently). Then, while the man batters at the door below, she rings the bell and tells Cara to climb. Count the chimes. On the twelfth, jump.

Would you do it? Cara isn't sure either, right up until the last second.

She lands somewhere warm, in a forest where the bark smells of cinnamon. This is Luster, the home of the unicorns. And it isn't all lovely. A goblin-ish creature called a delver tries to snatch the locket and holds her under a stream.

She wakes in a cave belonging to the Dimblethum, a gruff half-bear, half-man who always talks about himself by name. Then a unicorn called Lightfoot walks in. Before long there's a squirrelly little creature called the Squijum shouting "Hotcha!" at everyone, and a long journey ahead to find the Queen of the unicorns.

These unicorns aren't sparkly or cute. Lightfoot is beautiful, but he's also a bit touchy and keeps secrets. His horn can heal, but it's sharp enough to go right through her shirt. (It only hurts for a moment, and it leaves a tiny star-shaped scar.)

The opening is genuinely tense, which matters if your reader is easily frightened. The chase through the church is scary, Cara hears her grandmother cry out in pain, and the scene in the stream comes very close to drowning. There's sadness too. Cara's parents left when she was three and it still hurts.

For a child who likes an adventure with real danger in it, it's a thrill. Cara is brave without being fearless, which makes her lovely company. This is the first of the Unicorn Chronicles.

What to read next

If they come back wanting more unicorns, The Unicorn Quest has two sisters in a huge old house full of strange objects, an ivory unicorn under a dust sheet and a ladder in a fireplace that one of them can't stop thinking about.