Book Review: The Unicorn Hunters by Katherine ArdenA gorgeous historical fantasy at the border of history and legend
The Unicorn Hunters As he lay on his death bed, the old Duke of Brittany made his daughter Anne promise that she would keep their lands free from foreign rule. Years later, as duchess in her own right, Anne has kept her word but it has not been easy. Brittany’s coffers are running low and they don’t have an army large enough to fight off invaders. Anne is clever, though, and has negotiated a secret proxy marriage to Maximilian of Austria, the great enemy of Brittany’s neighbor, France. But before the ambassador can arrive to finalize the marriage, the French envoy arrives with a demand from King Charles: he will have Anne’s hand in marriage or he will take Brittany by force. With little option but to play for time, Anne makes a wild-seeming suggestion: they will organize an expedition into the wild Brocéliande Forest in order to hunt a unicorn. When a unicorn actually appears, the course of Anne’s future– and that of Brittany– changes forever. With her debut adult novel, The Bear and the Nightingale, Katherine Arden quickly established herself as a brilliant new voice in historical fantasy. Her three subsequent novels (The Girl in the Tower, The Winter of the Witch, and The Warm Hands of Ghosts) showed that her debut success was no fluke. Arden’s latest, The Unicorn Hunters, showcases Arden’s skill as a storyteller who can blend history and legend with apparent ease. In The Winternight Trilogy, Arden took readers to medieval Russia, and then she took us to the battlefields of World War I in The Warm Hands of Ghosts. The Unicorn Hunters takes us to late medieval Brittany, a duchy on the northwest coast of what is now France that has a unique language, culture, and legend cycle that its people are struggling to preserve even here in the twenty-first century. The historical Anne of Brittany was a tragic figure. She did indeed make a proxy-marriage to Maximilian of Austria, but was forced to undo it when Charles VII of France threatened to overrun the duchy’s meager defences. Anne married Charles instead, was widowed, married another French king, and ultimately died young with Brittany falling under French control afterwards. In her acknowledgments, Arden writes about the year she spent in Brittany as a teenager and her walks in Brocéliande Forest- a real place whose legends she was unaware of until later. As an adult, Arden wondered ‘what if Anne had another, more magical solution to her problem?’. The Unicorn Hunters is an answer to that question, blending history, myth, and elegant writing into a tale that feels like it should begin, ‘Once upon a time’. Fairytale retellings have been an evergreen part of publishing for decades, though they have been especially popular over the past fifteen years. It sometimes seems as though every girl and woman from mythology and folklore has had some author or other rise up to provide a feminist take on her story-- to varying degrees of success. Too often, the ‘feminist’ retelling manages to do more to strip the heroine of her original strengths, either reducing her to a sarcastic figure only capable of sassing the people around her, or stripping her of her agency altogether so she can be saved by the one good man among the barbarians. Arden avoids this by respecting her heroines, giving them wit, and then letting them use their intelligence to solve their problems. Men might be there to provide support, but they’re not there to save the day. In The Unicorn Hunters, it is up to Anne to find a way through the political quagmire to save her people, her sister, and herself. With intelligence and grace, Katherine Arden brings the history and magic of medieval Brittany to life. The Unicorn Hunters was my most anticipated book of the year, and it lived up to all my expectations. I never quite knew what to expect from one page to the next, and yet every choice, every story beat made sense when all was said and done. Even when they were under the influence of magic, the characters felt realistic. Their decisions made sense, and their various fates were earned. Arden may not be the fastest fantasy authors writing these days, but she is one of the best. Her stories are always worth the wait. Thank you to NetGalley and Del Rey for the advance copy for review. Traveling in Books is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Traveling in Books that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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