Book bites: Rampant
Forget everything you ever knew about unicorns-majestic, noble creatures they are not. Real unicorns are venomous, man-eating monsters with huge fangs and razor-sharp horns, but luckily they were hunted to extinction a hundred and fifty years ago. Or so 16 year old Astrid Llewelyn skeptically “believes” (her mother is an unicorn enthusiast, though many say she’s just crazy), until one vicious unicorn actually attacks her boyfriend. She is soon whisked off to Rome to train as an unicorn hunter, where she learns things almost too crazy to believe: that there are different types of unicorns; that there is an all-powerful “Remedy” that can cure lethal unicorn wounds; or that, worst of all, she comes from a long line of unicorn hunters.
I so wanted to like this book. I was deciding between this one and another at Borders, but I decided to go with Rampant because in her acknowledgments, the author thanks those who’ve created kick-ass characters like Eowyn, Buffy, and Princess Leia-all exemplary characters in my book. So of course my gut instinct screamed “oooh this one!” But alas, my instinct was off that day, for I’ve reluctantly concluded that Astrid is not one of them.
Peterfreund goes to great lengths to establish a believable alternate history, in which the unicorns famously pictured in medieval tapestries and what not are actually bloodthirsty, murderous little critters, whose horns are actually full of poisonous venom. For instance, one famous unicorn was actually Alexander the Great’s Bucephalus, who was a karkadann, a massive, elephant-sized unicorn. Problem is, I never really believed it. To me, there’s something rather amiss with her world-building; rather than integrating unicorns seamlessly into the setting, which is modern-day Rome by the way, to me they were just creatures that conveniently popped up, weaving in and out of the story in a predictable fashion (i.e. whenever danger was needed). I think for any fantasy to be a successful one, authors have to suspend their readers’ instinctive disbelief-until the very last page-and Peterfreund probably lost me somewhere near the beginning.
Also compounding the problem is that I couldn’t bring myself to care for Astrid. Her characterization is schizophrenic at best: in one chapter she’s training to be an unicorn hunter, then in the next she’s contemplating whether she should Do It because not being a virgin anymore will allow her to escape her unicorn hunter duties. (Yes, on a curious sidenote, unicorn hunters must be virgins, or else they can’t see the unicorns.) Peterfreund incorporates a noteworthy message about love and sex and how one has always the agency to choose in both, but Astrid’s wishy-washiness just rubbed me the wrong way. I try not to let prejudices against certain characters taint how I judge a book, but in this case, I really can’t help it.