This delightful modern fantasy book will make older elementary students laugh out loud. The Plague of Unicorns is about a curious young duke who asks too many questions, but proves to be the only one asking the right questions when it comes to distracting marauding unicorns from eating through the golden apple orchard. Yolen’s masterfully crafted story, uses just the right voice and short, simple sentence structure to lure in unsuspecting readers to a fantasy world that is full of surprise. Each chapter propels the reader deeper into their imagination with a prose style that is friendly and accessible to beginning chapter book readers. This book would make a great read aloud to any grade 2-5 classroom, and due to the ease and natural flow of the writing, it is sure to inspire students to write a story of their own.

A sweet story that reads like a fairytale. It's charming and funny, with lovely characters and great illustrations. BUT. I would have liked it even more, I think, if it were a bit longer and gave us more of the older sister's story.

This is my entry for "book written by someone when they were over the age of 65" for the Read Harder challenge. ( )

I loved the magic, mystery, and innocence of this book. I was a little confused at the background story in the beginning, but once I met Young James and his family further in, I understood the timeline and the reason for it. As an adult I would have loved to learn more about the unicorns and more about how the "plague" was tamed (and the Unicorn-tamer, too), yet I liked the mystery around that particular character. IN all, I think this is a good read for children who enjoy fantasy. ( )

2.5 stars. This review is also available on my blog, Read Till Dawn.

I saw this on Booklook Bloggers and snapped it up, because it looked cute and fun and just my little sister's speed. I read it in one sitting, which took about a hour and a half, and thought it was largely just that: cute and fun and the kind of book my sister will like. It's got some great historical info mixed in with the usual fantasy fun. You can tell Yolen did her research on the time period before departing from actual history. My favorite nod to the past is the poem James and his sister come up with to remember the queens of England:

Tilda, Jane, Mary, Lizzy,
They all make me very dizzy.

I'm not exactly sure who "Tilda" is, but Jane is the often-overlooked three day queen who "ruled" before Bloody Mary (the "Mary" in the poem), and "Lizzy" is, of course, Mary's sister Queen Elizabeth I. I'm a bit of a history geek, so I thought it was fun seeing the book's references to actual history.

That said, this book has some major pacing issues. Literally the first half of the book focuses on world-building and backstory and character introductions. Those are all wonderful, necessary things to have in any engaging book - but this was the focus of the first half of the book. And that left only half of the (rather short) book to tell the actual events of the story.

And here we run into the next problem. Too many things happen in too few pages. We've got James' relationships with his sister, his mother, his uncle, and his absent father. We've got James' insecurities about being the next duke. We've got a rather (too) long bit where James is traveling to the Abbey. We've got the lukewarm welcome James receives from the boys living in the Abbey. We've got Brother Luke's lessons on caligraphy, with a bit of Latin thrown in. Then, of course, we've got the unicorns themselves and the long string of "heroes" who come to drive them away and inevitably fail. Which are important? Which are not? Who knows? There are too many characters and too many plotlines for a book this size.

Reallly, that's the issue. The book should have been longer. You could tell Yolen had a longer story to tell than she had pages to tell it with, and so she wound up spending the whole book setting up this wonderful premise and showing off her research of the era, then jumbling on a quick-finish ending last-minute when she realized she didn't have room to bring everything to fruition. I would have loved this book so much if she had made it longer and taken the time to flesh everything out. I would have called it a great kids book if she had snipped a bunch of the side plots, and evened up the pacing. As it is, all I can say is that it's a cute book with a great premise which will probably make kids blind to the pacing issues. Older readers will have a harder time ignoring all the "could have been"s.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book through BookLook Bloggers in exchange for an honest review. ( )

This story reminded me a lot of fairy-tale inspired books that I read as a child. It's clever, not at all condescending, and has an old-fashioned charm - mixed with a few modern twists.

The monks of a certain monastery have long been resigned to the fact that once every year, they're visited by a migrating herd of unicorns that ravenously chomp up all their golden apples. After all, they've got plenty of red and green apples to use for snacking and baking.

However, when a new abbot arrives, with a special recipe for making cider from golden apples, he's determined that things will change. Heroic (literally) efforts are expended toward saving the apples from the pesky unicorns - all in vain.

Meanwhile an annoyingly curious young ducal heir has used up nearly all the patience the residents of his family's castle have to spare. His older sister, Alexandria, is the only one who still bothers to answer his incessant questions. When he's sent to study at the monastery, a solution to the plague of unicorns may finally present itself...

The short novel is a quick read. It's aimed at middle-grade readers, but I felt that the writing style and the humor is such that it will be enjoyed equally by fantasy and fairy tale fans of all ages.


Many thanks to Netgalley and Zonderkids for the opportunity to read this book. As always, my opinions are solely my own.
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