Review: The Unicorn Crisis

Title: The Unicorn Crisis
Author: Jon Rosenberg
Nationality: British
Year: 2011
Publisher: Self-published
Length: 200+pp
Rating: 8/10
Summary: Brilliant debut fantasy

The outline

A light-hearted fantasy novel which follows ‘summoner’ David Ash as he tries to uncover who transported a deadly unicorn into modern-day Stratford-upon-Avon.

Sample

The Unicorn was going to be trouble. Just looking at it I could feel the world thinning around us. Worse still, one wrong move and the bloody thing would kill me.
"Okay," I murmured to myself. "What's the best counter to a Unicorn?"
"A virgin's always good."

The verdict

One thing is clear from reading The Unicorn Crisis – Jon Rosenberg has a powerful imagination. In this novel he has created a fully realised alternate reality, occupied by elves with an addiction to daytime TV, angry Hindu deities and a long-lived and magically talented version of Christina Rossetti.

The result is gripping and at times I didn’t want to put the novel down. Jon Rosenberg has a particular and rare talent for dialogue and can run a page of rapid fire speech without the reader losing track of who said what. On the downside, some of early sections dragged in pace a little, but this seemed to be largely down to scene setting and was made up for by absolutely brilliant final third with a final battle that reminded me of the Sword in the Stone.

I would definitely recommend this novel, particularly to fans of Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman or Doctor Who (and wouldn’t David Tennant make a great Ash?). I bought the sequel, The Digital Wolf, as soon as I had finished the last page.