Read The Unicorn in the Barn free in the Little Reads app.
The Unicorn in the Barn, for 7 year olds, is about a boy who sees something in the woods at night that has no business being there.
Eric Harper has a treehouse on the ridge behind his house. It is a wooden square about big enough to stretch out in, and it has been his favourite place since he was six. From up there he can see everything, including his grandmother's old farmhouse, which is not his grandmother's any more.
That is where the trouble starts. Grandma had to go into a nursing home, the family sold the farmhouse, and now a girl called Allegra is hammering No Trespassing signs onto Eric's tree.
They get off to a terrible start. He tells her she has the property line wrong. She tells him he shouldn't sneak up on people. She stomps off.
Then Eric falls asleep in his treehouse and wakes up in the dark, and something pale comes through the blackberry canes. Too big for a raccoon. Too quiet for a pony. And there has never been a pony born with a horn growing out of its forehead.
It is limping. Two steps and a hop.
Allegra's mother turns out to be a vet. She opens up her barn and lets it in.
What I like is how matter-of-fact the whole thing is. Nobody stands around being amazed for long. There is a hoof with an infection in it and a job to do, and Eric ends up holding the rope while Dr Brancusi drains the hoof with a titanium lancet, because iron is poison to some magical creatures and that is what got in there in the first place.
There is pus, a bad smell, a bit of blood on the gauze and an animal grunting while it is worked on. A child who loves animal-rescue stories will probably love that bit most of all. A child who goes green at the dentist might want to skip ahead a page.
The rest is quieter and a little sad round the edges. Eric misses dinner and nobody notices. The house he grew up walking to belongs to strangers now. His grandmother is somewhere else.
If you have got a reader who is happiest when someone is looking after an animal properly, with the right bandage and the right dose, this gives them a unicorn and still takes the care seriously.
Zoey and Sassafras does the same job at the same kind of pace. Zoey's barn has a doorbell that only rings when a magical animal outside needs help, and she and her mum work out the cure between them.
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