Rampant: Killer Unicorns, #1 -- Diana Peterfreund

From Rampant:

Sometimes I wondered if my mother, Lilith, understood the kind of damage she was inflicting on me with all her delusional stories about bloodthirsty unicorns. When I was six, and all my friends wanted to play unicorns and run around the playground on imaginary mounts named Rainbow and Starlight and Moonbeam, do you think I was the most popular kid in school?

Of course, now that she's sixteen years old, Astrid Llewelyn doesn't believe her mother's stories anymore -- like everyone else, she just assumes that Lilith is a little bit Out There.

Until the night that her story begins. When she's out in the woods with her pushy, grabass boyfriend, and, straight out of her mother's stories, a unicorn appears. And attacks.

Despite any and all protests -- "Forgive me if enforced lifelong celibacy and possible death by dismemberment and poisoning doesn't exactly get me excited" -- shortly thereafter, Astrid finds herself on a plane. Headed to Italy. Where she'll be trained as a unicorn hunter.

Life as she has known it is over.

Due to my horse issues, I've been putting this one off for quite a while. But, I was feeling like reading something Peterfreund-y vein, and I still can't bring myself to read Tap and Gown¹, so, when weighed, my Horse Issues turned out to be lesser than my What If Things Don't Work Out With Poe Issues², so Killer Unicorns it was.

Ultimately, I had mixed feelings.

Some of that response was very definitely due to the horse thing: Even though the killer unicorns were very much Killer Unicorns, with super-fast healing and armed with poisonous fangs and all, I was still a complete wimp about the battle scenes. Even when Astrid was just defending herself, I kept thinking about the Poor Horsies Getting Hurt, Limping Off Into The Woods To Be All Wounded And Stuff. I just kept thinking, "But they're just doing what they do! Poor poisonous meat-eating unicorns! They're just hungry! And people must be encroaching on their lands or something!"

Luckily, Astrid -- and her animal-lover cousin Phil -- actually voiced a lot of my concerns. So that helped get me past my Horse Stuff. And, SPOILER!, the plotting helped that out, too -- once it was revealed that there were Unicorn Factions, the violence against the Bad Guy Unicorns was easier to take. END SPOILER!

Beyond that, though, there were long passages about the History Of Unicorn Hunting that felt like what they were: long passages about the History of Unicorn Hunting. In other words, the information necessary to the world building didn't smoothly integrate into the storyline. Which was distracting, and made Astrid's voice feel choppy, which in turn made her a less believable narrator, and so never allowed me to fall into the story through her voice.

That isn't to say that I didn't enjoy the book -- just that it was uneven. Some of the dialogue and the moments between characters were really well done, and others felt forced. Some of the minor characters felt real, while others felt two-dimensional. Lilith, especially, was drawn in very broad strokes.

There was an aspect that I thought was really, really, REALLY especially well done in Rampant, though it's a bit of a spoiler. I'll explain without naming names or specifics: basically, I thought that the sexual assault storyline was really, really, REALLY excellently handled.

Diana Peterfreund showed that sexual assault -- that rape -- can happen without being overtly violent. That it can happen, and leave the victim unsure, even, if what happened had really happened. That in can happen in such a way that can leave the victim second-guessing herself, convincing herself that maybe she's either over-reacting or misunderstanding or misremembering. It's a very small thread in the book, but I thought it was, easily, the strongest thing in it.  

All of that said, it is, like Buffy, about a girl with unwanted power and unwanted responsibility. A girl who has to decide whether she's going to stand up and save the world... or not.

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¹Then it will be ALL OVER! I can't handle the idea of that series being finished. Also, I don't want to get my heart broken.

²I mean it! Don't tell me ANYTHING!

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Previously:

1.  Secret Society Girl
2.  Under the Rose
3.  Rites of Spring (Break)