Bad Unicorn

Platte F. Clark

Completed 1/10/2016, Reviewed 1/12/2016

4 stars

Whenever a book is compared to “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, I’m always a little cautious.  So many books strive to have Douglas Adams’ quirky humor, but few achieve it.  “Bad Unicorn” is the closest I’ve seen anyone get in a long time.  It’s a YA novel about a magical robot princess unicorn that eats humans and the young boy that has to fight her to save the human race.  It was simply delightful. 

The premise is that there’s a boy in who is the last descendant of a great wizard that wrote the Codex of Infinite Knowability.  Max is a young gamer who doesn’t realize that this book contains the most powerful magic in all the parallel universes.  An evil wizard from the parallel universe of magic, the Magrus, wants to get the book.  He chooses Princess the Destroyer, the unicorn, to come to our universe, the Techrus, to find the book in exchange for having an unending supply of humans to feed on. 

Max is a great kid.  He’s a nerd, into role-playing games, and gets picked on by a bully, known as the Kraken.  After surviving a close call with the bully, he and three friends get whisked to our future where he must come face to face with Princess to save the world.  It’s the great trope of the unassuming kid who must find the power within himself to overcome a great evil.

There’s a lot of tongue in cheek humor, some of it I don’t think young adults will necessarily get, like the Gore-Fest, which turns out to be a festival where poetry by Al Gore is read.  But there are lots of other fun jokes like the frobbits, which of course are variations of hobbits that are peace loving, flower picking pacifists who make wonderful appetizers for Princess.  And there are lots of little asides that range anywhere from making you smile to having a full guffaw. 

The book is the first part of a trilogy.  It has its own self-contained main plot, but does have a cliff hanger at the end, which is a little frustrating.  I have so many books on my TBR list, I don’t know if I’m going to get to the sequels.  But reading this first book was well worth it.  It’s very funny and pretty fast paced.  I give it four out of five stars.