The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle review and experience

This book legit made me high

This is a non-spoiler The Last Unicorn review. Writing this as a letter to my little three-year old daughter who loves unicorns.

Dear baby girl,

I am writing this post as a letter to you partly out of guilt that mummy and daddy went to the seaside and left you with granny so we could have some alone time. You would have loved it here, but you are currently at a tender age where you are not so much attached as glued to my side.

Your clinginess aside though, you are at an amazing age right now and sometimes I wish you could stay like this forever. Just the other day, I was cleaning out my office drawer and you picked up a discarded, blank roll of white paper, and you immediately started pretending it was a map. You unrolled it and solemnly told me that it was an “original”, and that it would show you the way to things. God, you are the absolute best.

Sometimes I am sad that that grown-up me no longer knows how to play “pretend” with you. You are always beckoning me to play dolls at your dollhouse, and I am usually too tired or dull to be much use there after a long day of work.

But you know what? I think you are rubbing off on me a little. During this trip I was walking in the sand and saw a huge hermit crab. I picked him up and said “hello, little guy!” and brought him to show papa. And what do you know, the hermit crab pinched me right in a soft spot between my fingers and wouldn’t let go until I set him back down and flicked him repeatedly in the shell. It was so so painful ( I still have a little red mark where he pinched me), and papa laughed himself silly. I felt like such an idiot – I mean, what did I expect the hermit crab to do? Start singing to me? I’ve been watching too many Disney movies with you.

Anyway, if I had brought you along this trip, I wouldn’t have been able to finish The Last Unicorn. I had deliberately avoided reading the book all these years because the movie was so sad. On a whim though, I downloaded it while I was at the airport waiting to fly out of the city, and finished it one beautiful sunny morning on the beach.

Back up a little. I watched the animated movie back when I was a kid (on Betamax, which is like Netflix but you need to put a large square plastic inside the TV and you only get one movie) and have only the vaguest memory of what it was about, other than about a unicorn, obviously. The lasting impression the movie left on me was that it was sad, which was what discouraged me from picking up the book all these years.

It did subconsciously leave a mark on me though. When I was a little older, like in the fourth grade, and without consciously remembering the movie, I would spend my time in school classes actively daydreaming about that I was a beautiful unicorn-princess living in a forest and doing magical things and meeting handsome princes.

Anyway, I hadn’t remembered that I used to daydream about being a unicorn in years. Reading the book brought back the memory, and reminded me that I used to have such a rich imagination-life, just like I see you having now.

So, back to present day. After I read The Last Unicorn, I felt like how people must feel when on hallucinatory drugs (which I swear I have never tried, your mother being way too chicken to attempt anything as exciting as that). This book is that amazing, as I’ve never read anything that has produced this exact visceral experience. It was unlike any other fantasy experience I have ever encountered. It forces you to see beyond what is there, beyond the veil of reality to the magic beyond.

After I put the book down, I sat down in the ocean shallows and tried to absorb what my heightened senses were telling me. The imagery in the book is so vivid and beautiful, and is such a unique way of looking at the world, that it seemed to release the magic in simple things like the sight of birds flying and the grey, rainy clouds over a distant island. I heard the wind moving across the waves and realized that it has the sound of stampeding unicorns in it. I was completely overwhelmed – I had to sit there for about an hour and just process what I had read and the sound of the wind. It got so intense that I started to become scared that I would no longer be able to be able to appreciate a beach and a forest and a palm tree simply for what they are anymore. This book, just from the power of its writing, had transported my mind to a sort of other dimension, that was almost disorienting. The sound of the crickets in the trees seemed louder than possible and like it was trying to tell me something about their lives in the forest. I was there but not quite there.

This book reminded me how powerful a child’s imagination can be, and how there can be so much more to life than what appears on the surface. I sometimes forget in the humdrum every day of work, meals, school, and sleep that there is so much more to children than meets the eye. You may just look like a little girl, but you are impossibly magic and you make magic in everything you do.  I can’t wait for the day that I can read this to you, and we can bask together in the amazing world that Peter S. Beagle created. And you will be a little older then, too, and I hope this book will remind you are that you were once, and will forever be, completely magic.

That reminds me. Months ago, I was doom-scrolling on Instagram, and out of nowhere I see this post with a beautiful snippet of poetry that stuck me in the heart with TRUTH and wtf it made me suddenly tear up (while scrolling on Instagram! Even I know this is shameful). Later that evening, I recounted the experience to papa and started bawling again.

This poem basically sums up everything I feel about you, so thank you Jessica Jocelyn, poet (tearing up again as I copy-paste this on here from the Goodreads website).

“if you ever have a daughter, it will be payback.”

and it absolutely is.

she is all the love I’ve ever tried to give and all the love I should’ve received.

she is all the magic I lost along the way. ”

― Jessica Jocelyn, Stars At Last

https://www.instagram.com/letters.to.anna/