Katherine Arden is known for her historical-based fantasies (The Winternight Trilogy). In her new standalone fantasy, The Unicorn Hunters, she takes readers to medieval France and reimagines the life of Anne of Brittany. In reality, Anne of Brittany was married off to the King of France as a teenager in order to bring that territory into the larger country. But Arden imagines a different outcome of Anne’s life, one that is influenced by mythical animals and ancient fae beings, who in this novel are called the Korrigan and live in an alternate world known as the Lost Lands.
When The Unicorn Hunters opens, Anne of Brittany is living with a protector and trying to fend off the advances of the King of France. She knows that if the marriage goes ahead she will lose her independence and that of her lands. She comes up with a plan that involves taking the King’s envoy to the magical forest of Brocéliande to hunt for a unicorn. Despite having not been seen for decades, Anne actually encounters one of the beasts and finds she cannot let it be killed. She also finds a man who claims to have been in the Lost Lands for 200 years and who claims to be able to help her. On her return to her castle, and with the arrival of the King’s sister, things become even more complicated.
The Anne of Brittany at the centre of this narrative is not the actual woman who was married off at 12 but an alternate kick-arse, strategic woman in her twenties. She understands how to play the games but also is quick to change tack when her plans are not coming out as she expected. On top of this, Anne gets to dabble in magic thanks to her connection with the unicorn. The unicorn in this case is on the side of right rather than sexual purity (which is fortunate because she also gets a romance which is probably a little superfluous).
The Unicorn Hunters is an alternate history but one with lost cities, magical creatures, magic users and fae. Readers should go into it not expecting a history lesson but a fantasy with historical underpinnings. Despite all of the changes wrought to the history, Arden manages to create a feeling of these events happening in medieval Europe. Just one that accepts that the powerful will employ magic users and that mythical creatures may well be living in the nearby forest.
The Unicorn Hunters by Katherine Arden
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