Unicorns &c.
Jan. 8th, 2010 16:56![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyReally cool, and pretty: Nalo Hopkinson talks to the New Yorker's Book Bench blog about her fabric designs and her writing, with pictures.
Peterfreund, Diana. Rampant. New York: Harper Teen, 2009.
What a strange book. I really don't know how else to describe it. Rampant is set in our world, essentially, except that unicorns have come back, and they're not nice sparkly creatures; they're bloodthirsty, ravenous beasts, and only virgin girls can take them down. The main character, Astrid Llewelyn, is doubly a scion of the strongest of the old hunter bloodlines; as the book begins her boyfriend is mauled by a unicorn, and after she saves him, he dumps her (supposedly because she attacked him because she wouldn't have sex with him), and Astrid's mother, who's been obsessed with their family's hunter heritage all her life, sends Astrid off to the convent in Rome where hunters used to train, and are starting to do so again. When Astrid's cousin Phil, who's just completed her first year in college, joins her, things get...interesting.
To wit, Phil and Astrid decide to have a proper Roman holiday. They each meet and start dating a European guy, and eventually Phil is raped by the one of them, because he was paid €10,000 by the hunters' corporate sponsor to do it (Astrid's boyfriend refused the same money, even when Phil's boyfriend got him drunk in an effort to convince him to go through with it). Oh yeah, the sovereign remedy to unicorn venom is a hot biochemical property, did I mention that? And Astrid wants to be a scientist, which leads to lots of random medical jargon. So of course, since Phil isn't a virgin she loses her hunter powers, the convent nearly falls apart under Astrid's mom's "leadership" and the day is very nearly not saved until Asrid gets her act together with the help of Boukephalos, Alexander the Great's horse, who was actually...a unicorn, and is still alive.
I hope this summary gets some of the incoherence of the book across. I liked some parts of it--yay Astrid and Phil female friendship, except that they're cousins, and the other hunters are shown being pretty catty with each other. Too, Astrid's mother is a near complete failure as a parent in ways that didn't seem to go much beyond stereotype, and the entire "Phil was raped" plotline was not redeemed in any way by how any of the characters dealt with, even though Phil winds up taking over the convent in the end. Astrid is really sarcastic, but she doesn't really seem to cohere very well as a character. I liked the frank approach to sex the book took, especially when Astrid is weighing sex versus social standing in the context of her worthless boyfriend in the beginning, but all in all, ick.
Peterfreund, Diana. Rampant. New York: Harper Teen, 2009.
What a strange book. I really don't know how else to describe it. Rampant is set in our world, essentially, except that unicorns have come back, and they're not nice sparkly creatures; they're bloodthirsty, ravenous beasts, and only virgin girls can take them down. The main character, Astrid Llewelyn, is doubly a scion of the strongest of the old hunter bloodlines; as the book begins her boyfriend is mauled by a unicorn, and after she saves him, he dumps her (supposedly because she attacked him because she wouldn't have sex with him), and Astrid's mother, who's been obsessed with their family's hunter heritage all her life, sends Astrid off to the convent in Rome where hunters used to train, and are starting to do so again. When Astrid's cousin Phil, who's just completed her first year in college, joins her, things get...interesting.
To wit, Phil and Astrid decide to have a proper Roman holiday. They each meet and start dating a European guy, and eventually Phil is raped by the one of them, because he was paid €10,000 by the hunters' corporate sponsor to do it (Astrid's boyfriend refused the same money, even when Phil's boyfriend got him drunk in an effort to convince him to go through with it). Oh yeah, the sovereign remedy to unicorn venom is a hot biochemical property, did I mention that? And Astrid wants to be a scientist, which leads to lots of random medical jargon. So of course, since Phil isn't a virgin she loses her hunter powers, the convent nearly falls apart under Astrid's mom's "leadership" and the day is very nearly not saved until Asrid gets her act together with the help of Boukephalos, Alexander the Great's horse, who was actually...a unicorn, and is still alive.
I hope this summary gets some of the incoherence of the book across. I liked some parts of it--yay Astrid and Phil female friendship, except that they're cousins, and the other hunters are shown being pretty catty with each other. Too, Astrid's mother is a near complete failure as a parent in ways that didn't seem to go much beyond stereotype, and the entire "Phil was raped" plotline was not redeemed in any way by how any of the characters dealt with, even though Phil winds up taking over the convent in the end. Astrid is really sarcastic, but she doesn't really seem to cohere very well as a character. I liked the frank approach to sex the book took, especially when Astrid is weighing sex versus social standing in the context of her worthless boyfriend in the beginning, but all in all, ick.