A Race to the Finish: The Last Hunt

I did it. It took over twenty years, but I finally finished reading Bruce Coville's The Unicorn Chronicles.

On the whole, the series is not super balanced. It wouldn't be, given that the 20+ years is what it took to be written (no offense, Coville). However the fourth and last installment does dovetail nicely with the third book, Dark Whispers, which leads into the final confrontation between the unicorns of Luster and their arch-enemy Beloved.

While I consumed Dark Whispers voraciously, I can't say the same about The Last Hunt. The narrative jumped all over the place - necessarily, because now there were so many different characters and minor storylines to keep track of. That's true for a large segment of epic fantasy, but here the segments were so short that I came away from each one thinking not that much had progressed in each individual plot before moving on to the next thing and repeating the experience. So on the whole, the pace felt much too slow for this book, considering that Beloved was already in Luster and planning her final attacks. I didn't feel that sense of chaos or pandemonium that I expected.

The new characters that were introduced at this point in time were not entirely interesting or useful. Honestly, at the endgame you want a cohesive conclusion to the stories of the characters you've been tracking since Book One. Clearly they are still part of the story, but they didn't shine as narrative leads, and that made the whole thing feel watered down. And the introduction of other pseudo-celestial beings as an explanation for the impending doom of the world just felt too separated and far afield from the familiarity of this world to make sense within in.

Without spoiling anything, some of the characters undergo major transformations, in a literal sense, that I just wasn't too keen on. And nowadays messaging about body image, especially in what's ostensibly children's literature, is something not to be taken lightly.

So, not as magical as the series began. It would have been quite a different tale, I think, if the installments of the series had been written more closely together, But hey, we're all human, and if nothing else I can congratulate Coville on finishing the series at all. He didn't have to, after so much time had passed. And imperfect as it was, it felt like a promise fulfilled.

K Rating: 2.5/5