Subject: REVIEW: Anne McCaffrey's The Unicorn Girl: The Illustrated Adventures

From: [email-masked] (Robotech_Master)
Date: 02 Sep 1998 18:44:34 -0400

The Unicorn Girl: The Illustrated Adventures
	Review Copyright 1998 Chris Meadows

It was probably a bad idea to give "Anne McCaffrey's The Unicorn Girl: The
Illustrated Adventures" a title so close to "Acorna: The Unicorn Girl,"
but I suppose it couldn't be helped.  This confusingly-titled book is a
less worthy successor to the one it follows up, and leaves a somewhat
disappointing aftertaste when it is over.

"The Unicorn Girl" is actually made up of a novella, "Trouble in Kezdet,"
and two short stories, "Pony Girl" and "Acorna's Serum," as well as two
sidebars with brief informative blurbs on the planets and people of the
"Acorna" universe.  All three stories are written by different writers,
and none of them by Anne McCaffrey and Margaret Ball, the writers of the
two full-length "Acorna" novels.  The quality is quite uneven, and none of
the stories compares very favorably to the original.

"Trouble in Kezdet," continues from where the original novel left off, and
deals with Acorna's search for the elusive Dodger, who has rescued many
kids from the harsh working conditions of Kezdet's sweatshop labor.  "Pony
Girl" has Acorna make an appalling discovery on the gambling space station
of Kismet, and "Acorna's Serum" deals with Acorna going to earth to try to
help stop a deadly plague.

Oddly enough, considering that the subject matter of the Acorna series so
far has included children being sent to whorehouses and dying of veneral
diseases, the writing in "The Unicorn Girl" seems to be at a much more
_juvenile_ reading level than "Acorna."  This might be at least partly due
to the high level of exposition of past events, especially in "Trouble in
Kezdet," the fairly simplistic plots, the depictions of the heroes and
villains in even more polarized shades of black and white than in
"Acorna," and the use (possibly _over_use) of various cliches (the Oliver
Twistian references, the chain of events leading up to the climax of
"Trouble in Kezdet," and so on).

Of the three tales, "Trouble in Kezdet" (but shouldn't it really have been
called "Trouble _on_ Kezdet," given that Kezdet is a planet, not a city?)
is really the only one worth reading.  The short stories suffer from a
failing common to many short stories--there is simply not enough time to
develop a decent plot or characterizations.  All three of the stories are
predictable, and all leave a few annoying loose ends dangling, some more
obvious than others.  I imagine the loose ends might be partly meant to
set up for future "Acorna" short story anthologies (as the book's
introduction not-so-subtly hinted--"It is hoped this collection will be
the first of many intended to keep her symbol alive and make certain she
is not forgotten"), but some omissions seem just plain sloppy.

Given that "The Unicorn Girl" bills itself as "An Illustrated Novel," and
claims that illustrated novels are "A New Art Form For A New Age" -- which
in itself is a rich load of fertilizer, given that almost _all_ novels
used to be illustrated, and even in this day and age there are still a few
that have been -- it is only fair to look at the quality of illustrations
in the book.  The art is nothing to write home about; frankly, I'd rather
have my imagination than some of these pictures.  Oddly enough, there are
almost no decent new color pictures of Acorna herself--the ones on pages
8-9, 12-13, and 97 are the only ones that seem to be there--and the black
and white ones by John Ridgeway are very unflattering.  Both the cover
picture and the picture opposite the title page, which was derived from
the cover to "Acorna" by the same artist, are not even accurate depictions
of the way Acorna is described in the books.

To add insult to injury, the cover blurb is not only misleading but
sometimes downright _wrong_--we are most certainly not shown "Acorna's
heartbreaking search for her home planet" or "Acorna's first love
affair...with a human," no matter what it says, and "Acorna's fight to
stop a deadly plague on [...] Earth" actually amounts to little more than
contributing tissue samples and is not even the primary conflict in the
story, for that matter.

"Anne McCaffrey's The Unicorn Girl: The Illustrated Adventures" was a nice
try, but it's just not as good as the original.  I mildly recommend it,
mainly to Acorna completists and mostly because of "Trouble in Kezdet."

[Permission granted for newsgroup distribution & associated archival, and
to share with other people as long as you don't charge for it.  All other
rights reserved, but feel free to ask.]

%A  Mickey Zucker Reichert
%T  Trouble in Kezdet
%A  Jody Lynn Nye
%T  Pony Girl
%A  Roman A. Raineri
%T  Acorna's Serum
%B  Anne McCaffrey's The Unicorn Girl: The Illustrated Adventures
%I  HarperPrism
%C  New York
%D  December 1997
%G  ISBN 0-06-105540-9
%P  136 pp.
%S  The Unicorn Girl
%V  Book 2
%O  Hardbound, $22.00, printed in color

Chris Meadows aka  | Co-moderator, rec.toys.transformers.moderated
Robotech_Master    | Homepage: <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~robotech/>
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