Anne of Brittany has made a promise she intends to keep: her kingdom will not fall to France. Faced with an enforced marriage to her conqueror, she engineers a secret betrothal in the only place beyond the reach of magical spies, a legendary forest rumored to harbor unicorns. What begins as political defiance becomes something stranger and more dangerous when the forest delivers exactly what no one believed in anymore, and Anne finds herself navigating not just the courts of men but the shadowed edges of an older world entirely.
My Review
Thank you so much to Del Rey Books for the physical ARC!
Katherine Arden’s writing is beautiful. Her prose here is the kind that demands you slow down and actually read it, not skim, not half-listen on audio, but sit with it and let the sentences do their work. The problem is that beautiful writing alone couldn’t carry me through this one.
The Unicorn Hunters follows Anne of Brittany, a young sovereign navigating an impossible situation: marry the King of France and surrender her country, or find another way out. The political stakes are clear and compelling from the start, and Arden renders the weight of Anne’s position with real care. I spent the first half of this book invested in the court intrigue, the fragile alliances, and the question of whether Anne could outmaneuver everyone who wanted to claim her.
But here’s where I started to lose the thread: the magic takes a very long time to arrive. A unicorn here, a strange nun there, a man with ambiguous powers. For most of the first half, the story is so thoroughly grounded in historical realism that when the book takes a sharp turn at the midpoint into full-blown fantasy (shadow walking, evil sorcerers, sea dragons, the korrigane), it felt like I’d stumbled into a different novel entirely. The two halves never quite stitched together for me.
The pacing compounded this. Everything developed slowly, which isn’t necessarily a flaw in literary fantasy, but here it meant the characters started to feel like passengers in their own story rather than the driving force of it. That slowness also made me so bored at times. It took me a whole month to finish this book and I debated often times to DNF it. There’s also a romantic subplot that arrived feeling incomplete, like we’d missed a chapter somewhere.
I can see exactly who will adore this book: readers who love complex, lyrical prose, deep historical texture, and medieval fairytale atmosphere layered over real political history. If that’s you, this is probably a five-star read. It just wasn’t for me.