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Title | Rampant
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Author | Diana Peterfreund
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Cover Art | Duncan Walker & Emily Jose
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Publisher | HarperCollins - 2009
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First Printing | HarperCollins - 2009
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Title | Ascendant
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Author | Diana Peterfreund
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Cover Art | Gustavo Marx
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Publisher | HarperCollins - 2010
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First Printing | HarperCollins - 2010
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Title | Errant
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Author | Diana Peterfreund
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Cover Art | ---
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Publisher | ---
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First Printing | ---
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Category | Young Adult
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Warnings | None
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Main Characters | Astrid, Phillipa, Cornelius, Cornelia, Giovanni, Bonegrinder, Bucephalus, Isabeau, Brandt
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Main Elements | Unicorns
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Website | dianapeterfreund.com
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 Rampant
Forget everything you ever knew about unicorns...
Real unicorns are venomous, man-eating monsters with huge fangs and razor-sharp horns. Fortunately, they've been extinct for a hundred and fifty years.
Or not.
Astrid had always scoffed at her eccentric mother's stories about killer unicorns. But when one of the monsters attacks her boyfriend—thereby ruining any chance of him taking her to the prom—Astrid finds herself headed to Rome to train as a unicorn hunter at the ancient cloisters the hunters have used for centuries.
However, at the cloisters all is not what it seems. Outside, the unicorns wait to attack. And within, Astrid faces other, unexpected threats: from the crumbling, bone-covered walls that vibrate with a terrible power to the hidden agendas of her fellow hunters to—perhaps most dangerously of all—her growing attraction to a handsome art student ... an attraction that could jeopardize everything.
Ascendant
Astrid Llewelyn is now a fully trained unicorn hunter, but she can't solve all her problems with just a bow and arrow. Her boyfriend, Giovanni, has decided to leave Rome, the Cloisters is in dire financial straits, her best friend's powers seem to be mysteriously disintegrating, and Astrid can't help but feel that school, home, and her hopes of becoming a scientist are nothing but impossible dreams.
So when she's given the opportunity to leave the Cloisters and put her skills to use as part of a scientific quest to discover the Remedy, Astrid leaps at the chance. Finally, she can have exactly what she want--or can she? At Gordian headquarters, deep in the French countryside, Astrid begins to question everything she thought she believed: her love for Giovanni, her loyalty to the Cloisters, and most of all her duty as a hunter. Should Astrid be saving the world from killer unicorns, or saving the unicorns from the world?
I'll be honest, when I found this book in the library I thought it would be kind of silly. Not that killer unicorns were silly, a lot of folklore backs that up, but warrior virgin girls training to battle venomous meat-eating unicorns? I know it worked for Buffy but wasn't sure it would work here.
Except that it did. As I got into the story and you realize there is more to it than meets the eye, I found myself wanting to learn more. And of course rooting for the girls. Feeling a bit sorry for the unicorns, but they did seem rather evil for the most part. Bonegrinder was like living with a little homicidal psychopath (she's their "house unicorn", because one always wants to keep uncontrollable man-eating beasts as a pet). It takes place in Italy, so one can enjoy the setting of Rome. It's a young adult novel, so of course there had to be a romance, but see, it gets tricky, lose your virginity, lose your immunity to unicorn venom. This adds a different level of complexity for a girl trying to decide if she should offer herself to a boy. Here she could use it as a way to escape her fate. But she does like him, doesn't want to use him that way, and, well, what happens to everyone else when she's gone. On the other hand, she does like him, and he likes her, and *whew* her dilema isn't that "Wimper, whine, I'm not good enough, I'm so boring and he's so perfect, sob, I can't deserve him, blah, blah, blah", I really hate that in a book. Here, deciding to be with a boy is actually a life choice, not a popularity contest. And of course in this book there are girls as young as 10 kicking unicorn but while the nearly twenty year old guy has to hide out in the car. See, I'm not all that big a feminist, but the unicorn thing? It has a precent in folklore, what with the unicorns being attracted to maidens and laying their heads in their laps.
Towards the end, I think there was a little bit of deus ex machina where they girls got to bypass years of training to take on a unicorn army, but really, that wasn't actually a key part of the story so I can give it a pass.
The second book continued to impress me with it tackling serious issues. After, when was the last time have you read a first-person narrative where the main character is suffering from brain damage caused by a blow to the head? Don't most characters somehow manage to get through the worst of things with relatively minor injuries, and of course don't get sidelined right before they need to save the world. Or does the world even need saving? Should she be hunting the unicorns or protecting them. What if they were wrong about the Remedy? And who can you trust when you know your mother is pushing you to live the dream she never could (kind of like a dance or beauty queen mom) and frankly probaby wouldn't have wanted had she had to be the one to face a thousand pounds of charging equine with a big venomous pointy thing aimed right at your heart. I know a lot of people who watch war movies, think it would be cool to go out and do that Rambo style...till they realize they aren't killing imaginary people, and those people shoot back, and people don't die cleanly, and you lose your friends, and children get caught in the cross fire. The real world isn't a movie. And yet though Astrid wants out, and getting out is actually very easy, she also knows she we will leave the handful of remaining hunters even weaker, and those unicorns really are going around killing people and no one else can stop them. A lot of hard choices to be made.
The problem with this series is that the author intended it to be a trilogy. She published the first in 2009 and the second came out a year later, with one short story in each subsequent year. But now it's been 9 years, I'm guessing the final book will never be written seeing as she's written two other series in the meantime. The first book works ok as a standalone, if you read just that one. The second is not a cliffhanger but it is clearly unresolved so I don't recommend reading it unless you don't mind never finding out how the story ends.
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