Peter S. Beagle, In Calabria (2017)

In Calabria by Peter S. Beagle

Published: 2017
Read: December 2025

One of my wife's favorite ever books is Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn, so I periodically buy her other Beagle fantasy books as presents. I have never read The Last Unicorn, though—nor, I think, anything else by Beagle. (I will get to Last Unicorn in 2044(!) as part of my project to read Hugo-winning and Hugo-related books.) Several years ago, I bought her this unicorn-focused book by him; back in December, I semi-randomly plucked it from her shelves and decided to give it a go, as my introduction to Beagle.

I'm not going to write off Beagle based on this one book, but I did not particularly enjoy this. Beagle writes well, and creates an evocative setting and a clearly drawn central protagonist... but the story itself I just didn't care for at all. An old Italian man discovers a unicorn is living on his farm and must protect her from the world, that's fine, but really the unicorn comes across as a sideshow to the main plot, which is that a hot twenty-something woman falls in love with him for no readily apparent reason, the end. I'm not opposed to an age-gap romance, but there's no work put into this one. Love is work, but this guy does none (at least in the relationship, he puts work into the unicorn), he just gets rewarded with a hot chick. Evocatively told, but I hope other stories by Beagle have better premises than this.