Peter S. Beagle has written another novel devoted to celebrating unicorns. His first one, The Last Unicorn, was published in 1968. This one, In Calabria, was published in 2017, almost 30 years later.

It is definitely a wish-fulfillment sort of book. Claudio Bianchi, a late middle-aged man living alone in a remote farm with a goat, three cats, and three cows, discovers that a unicorn has decided to have her baby on his land. He falls in love with a much younger woman (more than 20 years) and becomes the unlikely hero protecting both the woman and the unicorn whom he calls respectfully La Signora.

I read the book swiftly. It has a straightforward narrative structure. Bianchi has a tragic past and that becomes relevant when he has to help the unicorn give birth. By that point, La Signora has spent so much time traipsing daintily around his farm and accepting his hesitant gifts of fresh grass and flowers to eat that she trusts him. The ending is rather Hollywood with Italian gangsters and too much violence. Why must books (and movies) have so much violence? I mean violence of a rather personal and staid nature. More about that I think with another post.

Would I recommend this book? Maybe. But it is definitely written by a man who seems to be surveying his life and wishing his life had more heroic opportunities which he then gives his fictional surrogate.