The Unicorn Rescue Society
More than you bargained for!
Hey friends, it’s Snarf-day.
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This is another series that I think we discovered because Leo liked the cover. These are dense, and honestly a bit much for a six-year-old, so we didn’t get too far, but that’s not to say they aren’t worthwhile. It’s just good to know what you’re getting into.
On to…
The Series: The Unicorn Rescue Society (series website)
The Author: Adam Gidwitz (after the first, there is a different co-author for each one)
The Illustrator: Hatem Aly
Length/Picture Density: 200-220 pages, pictures every few pages
Oh man, there is a lot going on here. In a mostly good way. These books are good, and honestly a real achievement. It’s one thing to throw together a story about a white kid who befriends a dragon and deals with a bad wizard. Not that it’s easy, but, well, you’d have some giants and lesser beings whose shoulders you can stand on. That’s less the case for a rescue tour of lesser known mythical beasts (Jersey devils, chupacabras, etc.), which each delve into an only semi-varnished history and present of very specific locations (the Rio Grande, Basque Country, New Jersey).
It’s honestly a series I would have liked to have written at a certain point in my life: convoluted, political, but driven to life by likable, unusual characters — nearly every one of them extreme in some way.
The main characters are two high schoolers, Elliot and Uchenna, who have the typical odd couple dynamic of bookish, studious, measured, careful vs. spontaneous, passionate, action-oriented, risk-taking. The action, however, is driven by the mad Professor Fauna, who regularly whips things up into a manic tone and pace, and has no real idea how to act in polite society.
The bad guys are the Koch brothers. I mean the Schmoke brothers. The very thinly disguised Koch brothers.
It’s kind of like if you took the Magic Treehouse series, aged Jack and Annie up to high school, made one of them a person of color, transformed the Leave-It-To-Beaver ethos into one of trying to grapple with this mad world in all its complexity, then replaced the treehouse with the battiest professor you had from your academic life.
I suppose I should mention that you might find something objectionable in here if you oppose lefty political views in general. The books don’t exactly hit you over the head with a certain issue stance (the Schmoke brothers thing notwithstanding), and even try to moderate on age-old conflicts like tradition vs. modernity. They fit with my general political feelings, but someone coming from a different angle might find parts of these grating.
The lessons in these don’t get in the way of the stories any more than they do for something like Zoey and Sassafras, but the topic areas are ones that adults grumble over after the kids are asleep. One of them, for instance, was written in 2019 and includes a certain in-progress border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. The book tries, successfully in my view, to show proponents of both the wall and no-wall, while showing the value and historical precedent of communities that live on both sides who should not be divided.
Because there is so much going on, I found them more enjoyable once I was halfway through my first one, when I’d gotten the rhythm of the characters and the story.
Leo likes these, but they are big and unwieldy, so he loses steam when the narrative goes too long without some action or the appearance of a mythic beast. My best guess is that you’ll want your reader to be at least eight before trying to tackle these, and could go considerably older — there is a lot to absorb in here. They might even work as light reading for adults.