Unicorn Quest 1 – The Unicorn Quest

Kamilla Benko's The Unicorn Quest is a fantasy for 8 year olds about a girl who is frightened of the dark and climbs straight up into it.

What happens

Claire and Sophie Martinson are spending the summer at their great-aunt Diana's mansion, cataloguing thousands of strange objects for an estate sale. A chair made entirely of antlers. A castle in a bottle. The stone hand of a statue holding paper clips.

And in one sheeted gallery, an ivory unicorn on a pedestal and a wooden ladder going up inside an enormous fireplace.

Sophie climbs it, because Sophie climbs everything. Claire follows, because the alternative is being left behind.

What's at the top isn't a roof.

The sisters are the heart of this. Sophie was very ill last year and is better now, and Claire is still braced for it happening again. Sophie calls her Clairina, scares her for fun, tells her she's a baby, then climbs into her bed at night to say sorry without ever saying sorry. Any reader with an older sibling will recognise the lot.

Claire is lovely company too. She's an artist. She keeps a pencil tucked behind her ear for luck and understands the world by drawing it, which is exactly why the dark defeats her. You can't draw the dark.

Then there's the thing waiting in the garden on the other side, and this is the bit to read before you hand the book over. A creature of melted shadows on a too-long skeleton, with a face the book calls a human skull filled with fangs. It chases the girls, knocks Claire flat and gets a dry hand round her ankle. That's two chapters in and it is properly frightening. Afterwards comes a stretch where Claire is told firmly that she imagined all of it, and starts to doubt herself, which some children find worse than the monster.

For a child who likes being scared in a safe chair, it's pitched about right. For one who doesn't, that chapter will be where it stops.

Sophie's illness sits in the background rather than the foreground, but it's there. A hospital, a specialist's appointment, and a re-birthday thrown at home for the birthday she spent on a ward.

What to read next

If the idea of an ordinary bit of furniture opening onto a whole country appeals, you'll find The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe here as well. Four children, a wet morning, an old professor's house you never seem to reach the end of, and one empty room with a wardrobe in it.