Title Learning About Unicorns Series --- Author Laura Alden Illustrator Krystyna Stasiak Publisher Childrens Press - 1985 First Printing Childrens Press - 1985 Category Children - Reference Warnings None Main Characters --- Main Elements Unicorns

A collection of legends, folktales, and lore revealing the origins, history, habits, and powers of unicorns.

I like the illustrations, they have a distinct eastern European feel to them, perhaps because of the illustrator's origins, stylized without being silly. The text on the other hand, I'm not too impressed with. I was fine with the simplicity of the text, but pretty much everything it wrote seemed wrong (unless there is even more unicorn lore our there than the dozens of reference books that I've already read this year). I never read anything about unicorns drinking from waterfalls to keep their heads up so they can see hunters, or that the unicorns didn't get on Noah's Ark because Ham was tired of cleaning stalls and shut the door to keep other animals out. There is of course a Noah story, but not a "Ham was lazy so the unicorns died".

On the other hand, not all the legends were put down wrong, and I liked the fact that it also covered modern unicorn tales such as The Last Unicorn, especially seeing tales I have read during the year summarized and illustrated in a different way (and finding some I didn't come across to add to my to read list!).