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littleknownbooks2011-04-09 09:51 am
othercat) wrote in littleknownbooks2011-04-09 09:51 am
Ariel by Steven R. Boyett
Finding out that Ace had done a reprint of Ariel was a gleeful sort of shock. It’s a very, very hard book to find used copies of, and has always been a long time favorite. I was in fifth grade when I first read it. Those of you familiar with the sex and violence in the book may gasp in horror now. I’ll give you a minute. (No, my parents never knew that some of the books I was reading at that age tended to have a lot of sex and violence in them. To mom and dad, it was fantasy and therefore freakish, but harmless, and in Ariel’s case, the book had a unicorn on the cover.)
A quick and flippant synopsis of the book is “A Boy and His Unicorn Meet a Man and His Dog: Things Happen.” The setting is a relative rarity; the post-apocalyptic fantasy, and the characters are a combination of complicated, interesting and annoying. (They are very “human” characters that way. No real heroes in this book, not even the protagonists and the survivalist samurai type, Malachi Lee.)
Our Hero is one Pete Garey, a young man with a bad combination of survivor’s defensiveness and poor social skills. A former college student who has spent the past five years living by his wits, his life changes for--well actually, it pretty much doesn’t change at all, except for having a Familiar in the form of Our Heroine, a unicorn named Ariel. She’s one of a multitude of magical creatures that came to life in the wake of a mysterious event known only as The Change.Together, they fight evil necromancers. Badly.
Ariel
A quick and flippant synopsis of the book is “A Boy and His Unicorn Meet a Man and His Dog: Things Happen.” The setting is a relative rarity; the post-apocalyptic fantasy, and the characters are a combination of complicated, interesting and annoying. (They are very “human” characters that way. No real heroes in this book, not even the protagonists and the survivalist samurai type, Malachi Lee.)
Our Hero is one Pete Garey, a young man with a bad combination of survivor’s defensiveness and poor social skills. A former college student who has spent the past five years living by his wits, his life changes for--well actually, it pretty much doesn’t change at all, except for having a Familiar in the form of Our Heroine, a unicorn named Ariel. She’s one of a multitude of magical creatures that came to life in the wake of a mysterious event known only as The Change.
Ariel