The Last Unicorn
A unicorn searches for others of her kind, learns about mortality by becoming human, and turns into a tragedy disguised as a fairy tale. Beagle's prose is so precise it feels inevitable. The most beautifully written quest fantasy in American literature.
It reads as a string of vivid set pieces rather than a driven plot, and some readers describe “watching the story from afar” rather than being pulled in. Once the unicorn takes human shape several find her passive and cold; “there wasn’t enough of the unicorn” in her own book, one objects. Detractors call the whimsy “obnoxiously precious and cutesypoo,” the pop-culture-quoting butterfly and the fourth-wall jokes “essentially Shrek without as much charm or heart.” Even admirers flag the interspersed songs as the weakest link and admit skimming them. And readers wanting Tolkien-style scaffolding find the worldbuilding thin.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
