Rating: WORTHY!
"…venomous, killer unicorns" and no prologue!! What’s not to like? I have read nothing of Peterfreund prior to this. Seriously: a book about virgins written by someone whose name translates, quite literally, to 'friend of Peter How weird is that?! As of starting this review, I'm now almost a hundred pages in (~25%) and I'm liking this outing very much so far.
Just in passing with regard to my reading, and excluding this particular novel, I've read twenty since I began this blog in January. My stated aim was to read one novel per week in 2013, which would mean I'd be at about eight by now, and I'm well over twice that already. Indeed, at a rate of one per week, with what I've read already, I'm approaching the halfway point! I'm pretty pleased with that: it means that I can take some slack time when I need to and still be ahead of the goal.
Normally I won't read others' reviews before I start my own, but at some point I go out and read a few to get a measure of where my PoV is at compared with others, and to make sure I haven't missed covering something which others deem important. In this case I did things differently. I read several reviews beforehand, and it hasn’t made any difference to my own take on this (that I can tell!), but I learned that there's supposed to be "a major plot twist" somewhere towards the end of the book, and the death of "a major character" but none of this comes to pass! I don't know which book those reviewers were reading! I also know that vol 2 is already out, so if I like this I have the excitement of that one ahead, which is always a good thing.
Peterfreund both numbers and titles her chapters, and all of them begin "Wherein Astrid...". This amuses me so I'm going to use the chapter titles as markers throughout the review for a change. This book is a breath of fresh air coming right after Marcia Clark's unpleasant experience.
Wherein Astrid is Thrice Tested
I assume the thrice tested is firstly where our hero Astrid Llewellyn (yes double hell!) has to read sugary unicorn stories to her two charges whom she's baby sitting, secondly where she has to put up with her boyfriend's physical attentions, and thirdly where she discovers that unicorns are not the delusion of her slightly whack mother Lilith, but are real, come in five species, have venom in their alicorns, and kill humans for fun. They were supposed to be extinct. I guess now they're stinct again…! So she and he are sitting on a blanky in the woods behind the house where her two charges sleep (shame on you Astrid for leaving the house), and she sees something in the deeper woods. She goes to investigate and it turns out to be a Zhi - the smallest of the unicorn species, tamed over the years and now harmless. The other species are, in order of size: Kirin, Re'em, Einhorn, and Karkadann, which is the size of an elephant so we're told and was the "horse" upon which Alexander the great rode upon. All of the modern unicorn hunters are descended from Alexander.
I should say that the Zhi is tame to people like Astrid, not to ordinary mortals, so when her boyfriend shows up, it charges him and gores his leg. The venom starts to have an effect immediately. Astrid calls her mom, who shows up with a bottle containing the dried remnants of a remedy, which she liquefies with diet cola (cola dissolves anything!) and administers. It immediately cures Brandt (seriously? Names people, names!).
Wherein Astrid is called to Duty
Astrid gets dumped by this boyfriend, and now has no life, but her mother promptly bustles her off to Rome to be trained after her now resurrected calling.
Wherein Astrid is Cloistered
In Rome, Astrid doesn't do as the Romans do. Instead, she has to find her own way to the Cloisters of Ctesias where she meets Cornelius Bartoli (Neil) and his younger sister Cornelia (Cory for short). Astrid is to share a room with her. She is startled to find a Zhi on the bed. She warns Cory, who promptly grabs it by a leg and a horn and tosses it right out the window! It plunges two stories onto the rock courtyard, but it recovers from its injuries almost instantly.
Wherein Astrid Feels the Rush
Cory takes Astrid and Bonegrinder the pet unicorn to visit the catacombs. Bonegrinder is terrified fro some reason, and eventually bucks and pulls free, escaping back up the stairs. Astrid takes off after it like a bat out of hell, moving much faster than she has ever moved before. She brings it down and restrains it right before it gets out into the street, only to look up and see her cousin Phillipa Llewellyn (Phil), who has just arrived.
Wherein Astrid Gains an Ally
Phil and Asteroid/Asterisk/Astrodome make up Phil's bed, and Phil decides to keep Bonegrinder the Zhi in her room. Why she would not want to share a room with her cousin, as close and affectionate as the two of them are, is a mystery. Phil is a breath of fresh air to Astrid after the depressing tour of the catacombs with the unicorn skulls and other bones built into the walls.
["We're going to have a great time!" Looking at Phil's smiling face, listening to her sunny voice, like a breath from my pre-unicorn past, I could almost believe it. Then Bonegrinder burped, and I smelled blood.] Phil is actually a more attractive character to me than Astrid is at this point. I found myself wishing the story was about her instead of about Astrid! Not that Astrid is a poor character by any means.
The two cousins head out into the city and Astrid is immediately robbed by some "Gypsy" kids. I guess Peterfreund has never heard of Romanies. I think it’s rather shameful that she so readily tars them with the thief label - especially after I just got through watching Emma (reviewed elsewhere on this blog), which did the same thing. Couldn’t Astrid have been robbed by "just thieves"?
I found the theft suspicious. Perhaps it’s only a cheap means to get Astrid and Phil hooked up with two guys, but I doubt that Peterfreund is that simple. If there's something else going on there, then the opposition now has a lot of information on Astrid, who chases the thief but can't call on the speed with which she ran down the unicorn. An Italian-looking guy overtakes her and catches the kid but the purse with her passport is gone. It turns out he's an American of Italian descent, and he has a friend with whom Phil hooks up, so now they both have dates.
Wherein Astrid Makes the Leap
They go to a night club area of town, but Giovanni, Astrid's date, gets a headache, so they go sit outside and drink some water, and when Phil and Seth come out, Astrid senses unicorns up on the hill across the way. They head home, Giovanni and Seth walking with them. When they arrive, Astrid talks with Gio whilst Phil makes out with Seth, and then Astrid again senses a unicorn presence and flies to the door. Gio catches up with her, but sees nothing. The unicorn is a Kirin, and it seems like it's taunting her to come get it, threatening Gio to make her lose control, and Astrid does! She takes off after it.
Wherein Astrid Draws First Blood
She leaps onto it and rides it. The other three watch her go. She's almost breaking it in, but she gets scratched, and falls off it. Now right after this, Gio’s reaction is really interesting. My guess at this point is that he knows far more about Astrid and her quest, and the history of humans and unicorns than she ever suspects he might. Phil notices nothing, but is miffed that the guys leave so quickly after Astrid has been injured.
Back inside, the two of them are chewed out by Neil for leaving the grounds, but Phil and Astrid fight back, telling him that he isn’t their father, that this is no longer a convent and they’re not nuns. They are, as women, no longer chattel, and the rules need to be brought into the 21st century. They learn that Neil just simply fell into his role not because he's especially qualified by experience or even by lineage, but because there was no one else, and he agrees with them that there need to be changes.
But what Phil and Astrid have learned from this exchange is what happened with Cory to make her detest the Zhi so much: it was with a herd which attacked and killed her family, and for some reason Neil had decided that since it was such a young Zhi, they should keep it. Later Astrid learns from Martin Jaeger, the pharmaceutical guy who's bankrolling the Cloisters of Ctesias, that experiments have been conducted on it. I guess this is why it hasn't been killed.
Wherein Astrid Welcomes the Hunters
The rest of the hunter crew start showing up and they are, curiously, nearly 100% from Europe. There's no one from South America, no one from Africa, no one from Australia. We get a token one from Singapore and another from India, no one from China. They welcome them that evening into the 'common room' which was where Astrid had gone with Cory and the deathly-scared Zhi, but as they light up the room, Astrid sees there is much more to it than she had seen in the darkness on her last trip down there. There's a piano made from bones, and a throne made entirely from alicorns, which gives Phil a shock when she sits on it. There's also a weird vibe to the place, which Rosamund (the dark lady of Shakespearean fame?!) identifies as a musical note, which becomes very pronounced when all of the hunter girls touch the wall at the same time.
Wherein Astrid Offers a Challenge
A guy called Lino is brought in to teach them archery, but he's not exactly floored by their skills (yeah, I went there!). Phil excels at archery, and even Astrid is no slouch. Cory shoots Bonegrinder with a .22 pistol, and Phil is outraged. Astrid seems to forget that the unicorn will heal. This is when they learn of all the experiments conducted upon her by the Pharm guys. Phil is outraged and appalled by this.
Wherein Astrid Shoots and Scores
Astrid tries to ingratiate herself with the pharm guy to learn more about what he's doing. She tells him that she can be of help by giving him feedback from what she learns in the field. She really doesn't want to be a hunter, and she sees this as a way to side-step it into healing. After the shooting of the Zhi, Astrid talks with Cory about what happened to her family, but their conversation is interrupted by Neil. Later that evening when they're all at dinner and Astrid is about to lure Cory to the bathroom to finish their chat, they're interrupted by the arrival of another girl. The girl is Valerija Raz, dressed like a punk, who responds to Neil's attempts to turn her away (suggesting that this isn't a soup kitchen!) by pulling out the head of the Kirin upon which Astrid had ridden that evening. Valerija is another hunter.
Wherein Astrid Devises a Strategy
The new girl really stirs things up in the Cloisters. She rooms with Phil, which makes Astrid actually appreciate Cory, because it makes Cory seem less psycho! They note that Valerija has three knives: one regular, one switchblade, and one Swiss Army, "a bowl and spoon encrusted with gunk", a plastic container that sounds like it's full of pills, three paperbacks in an alphabet which Astrid doesn't recognize, and a hubcap! They cannot figure out how she killed the Kirin with only those knives. Everyone is scared of her, so the other girls retreat and begin gossiping whilst Cory voluntarily goes to talk with her.
They begin talking about their virginity and the reasons why they are so. Phil says it's because she had no interest in putting it about. Rosamund says it's because she's Catholic (see! She is Shakespeare's Dark Lady!). Zelda doesn't say why she's a virgin but she argues that people think religion is the only reason, yet she says she's not religious. Astrid relates her story about Brandt. Dorcas says she broke up with a boy to come to the Cloisters. She says he was fine with no vaginal penetration but wanted everything else, including anal sex, which grosses Phil out. Dorcas says he argued that she couldn't get pregnant that way, upon which Melissende slyly mentions that you can't get pregnant with a condom, either (which is true in theory, but not in practice!). Grace says her father wouldn't even let her see boys. She went to an all-girls school - like girls don't have sex with each other!
Phil makes a remark about guys being first and the responsibility of that, to which Astrid remarks that not all girls are as good-looking as Phil in that they can have a second choice if they turn the first one down. Phil doesn't understand where that remark came from! Well, Phil, what about your annoying habit (yes, it was amusing to begin with, but has now become old, especially after she's insisted upon calling Astrid 'Asteroid' or 'AstroTurf' when Astrid is annoyed or upset. I've changed my mind about Phil! Valerija is now my favorite! Yeah, I'm so fickle!).
When Astrid remarks, wistfully if not outright regretfully, that if she'd had sex she wouldn't even have to be there, Melissende remarks that the boy with whom a hunter has sex in order to remove herself from the hunter pool is an Actaeon. Cory breaks up that little revelation with an announcement that Valerija is a Vassilunas - a family line which was thought to have died out.
Phil takes Astrid out of the Cloisters and into the city, telling Neil she wants to buy some decent hunting clothes for herself and Astrid, but she's really meeting Gio and Seth again, and they visit the Borghese Gallery. Astrid is convinced that the only reason Gio came along was to allow Seth to be with Phil, but she learns from Gio that he thought she was in the Cloisters to become a nun. In a conversation, we learn that maybe Gio doesn't have an inside track on Astrid and her calling, although he does say he thought he saw a unicorn and Astrid says she did too. Then she kisses him.
At the end of this chapter I have no good idea what the strategy is which Astrid thinks she has devised, but it seems that she has resolved to lose her virginity to Gio and thereby exempt herself from the hunter program. If that be so, then there remains only one small problem with her scheme: what if the Actaeon rule is still in force?
Wherein Astrid Takes Action
OK, 'Action' is way too close to Actaeon! The two words can even be made to sound the same with a very small change in pronunciation of one of them. Astrid blows off Phil and Seth after they leave the museum, and takes off with Phil to visit his dorm. Her plan is to get herself seriously and properly good and laid, thereby freeing her of her commitment to the Cloisters, so she can get the heck out of Dodge. Or in this case, out of doing as the Romans do and calling home Rome.
Unfortunately, Gio wants to eat, so they stop at this little trattoria and it takes forever, so they're running seriously late as compared with her initial plan, by the time they actually arrive at his dorm, and Astrid is having doubts about their ability to get her properly laid and get her back to the Cloisters by 10pm as she'd agreed with Phil earlier. Here's where it gets amusing. Gio tells her that he's not allowed to bring members of the opposite gender into the dorm, so he leads her around back where there's a pool and some comfortable loungers, and Astrid decides this will work. Soon she's concerned about how she can get this to go down. She thinks she'll have to make the first move if she is to get things moving, and especially if she wants to inject some haste tryst, so she's running different ideas through her mind about whether she should grab his butt, or put her hand down his pants or whatever.
Then the unpredictable happens. Just as Astrid began to reach for his belt buckle, knowing she was ready and feeling quite solidly that he was ready, he stopped things. He suggests that she's a virgin phrasing it as a question, and she admits it, and prefacing his words with "Don't take this the wrong way" which goes down like she was wishing he would, he tells her he doesn't want to make love with her. She gets upset and she's saying things that come out sounding really wrong, and he says, "Astrid, I don't want to ruin everything" and she's thinking that she wants him to "ruin" her!
This is amusing because it's so turned around, so "opposite" of "the norm" and yet both of them are behaving as they do for what can be seen as honorable reasons: Astrid because she wants out of the Cloisters and he's the only guy she's met that she can feel so good about making love with; he because he doesn't want to be a one-night stand and she's virtually told him that they'll never meet again so it should be ideal for a guy - don't guys dream of this? (I actually never did, but I know there are many guys who do).
Wherein Astrid Draws a Bow and a Conclusion
Suddenly it's two weeks later and Astrid has seen Giovanni some more but not much more, and has pursued her calling. This makes no sense to me. Either she's done with Gio or she isn't, and if she's been seeing him, how come she hasn't pursued her goal? It's like she suddenly doesn't want to leave. And her ex boyfriend Brandt from back in the USA? He's disappeared. Astrid seems to find nothing wrong with this, despite the fact that he disappeared right after she gave his name to Jaeger as being some one worth studying since he'd recovered after being given the remedy.
Worse than this is the archery! They claim that bullets don't work: that they don't kill the prey, but then neither do arrows, and we've seen the huge damage which a bullet did to Bonegrinder. So if their purpose with arrows, as it seems to be in this chapter, is to injure the unicorn so they can take it out, then a spray of hollow-cavity or mercury-filled or frangible bullets would cause far more damage, after which the hunters can still go in and finish the kill. So this bow and arrow thing is a real weak spot for me, notwithstanding how 'romantic' and Diana/Artemis it's supposed to be. It makes no sense at all. It's like light sabers for Jedi Knights!
So we find Astrid, Cory, Ilesha, and Grace up in trees with bows, while Valerija is sitting down below as a lure for the unicorns, but after five hours, none have shown up, which is causing Phil to argue with Lino about hunting techniques. Just as dawn looks like it's going to arrive, all of the girls perk up with the scent (or whatever it is they recognize) of a unicorn. Astrid suddenly realizes that it isn't approaching, it's already passed them and is heading towards the sheep upon which it preys. She takes off after it, with Valerija in tow. The other girls follow.
There's a bloody and disorganized kill in which both Valerija and Grace are injured, and then Phil of all people dispatches it. But before that she was whining to Astrid about her cousin's failure to support her when she tries suggesting changes which can be made in how they operate. Astrid was whining back that no matter how many changes Phil suggests, no one listens and of course, Phil whines back that if both the Llewelyns were arguing on the same side, perhaps things would change. I didn't get what the conclusion was that Astrid was supposed to have drawn.
Wherein Astrid Recovers
So they get back to base and get their wounds treated and try to scrub off the disgusting Kirin blood, and Phil is about out of it, and Valerija pops one of her pills, and grace wont; speak to anyone. Astrid calls her mom and flatly states that she wants to go back home but her mom is either majorly stupid or completely stupid and doesn't even hear what her daughter is saying, let alone properly listen to it. I want to go kick Astrid's mom's ass royally. But it does leave it squarely on Astrid that if she wants out then she's going to have to put out.
Astrid is so hyped up on something that she can't relax and leaves to take a walk. She happens upon the technicians working on the unicorn, taking samples, and she notices that the unicorn is healing, even though it's supposedly dead. I thought Phil had severed its head, but this apparently isn't the case - either that or Peterfreund's writing is really cryptic. But if its head is still attached, then how did it die?
Jaeger appears and tells Astrid she shouldn't be there. This makes me suspicious: like if she stays there too long, she will see something she's not supposed to see (like the "dead" unicorn recovering completely maybe?!). She again tries to talk him into letting her work in the labs instead of hunting and he won't listen to a word she says. She suddenly realizes that she's 'just a huntress' and never will be anything else, or even anything meaningful to anyone beyond that function. Lino comes in and has harsh words with Jaeger in Italian, and then he turns to Astrid and tells her that she isn't a hunter, she's a soldier, and that hits her like a bucket of cold water.
Phil seems to come out of her slump and they contact Seth and Gio and go out again but Gio seems quite pissed off with her and when they talk about it, it seems that Seth has filled Gio with a bunch of lies about what Phil and Astrid are doing in Rome - either that or Phil has lied to Seth and he's simply passed on what she told him. She tells Gio to quit listening to Seth, and he demands that she tell him what to believe, so she goes half way and tells him she's there to control the animal attacks that have been going on in the surrounding countryside.
They kiss in the park and Gio says "ti voglio bene" which means "I love you" but he won't translate it for her. Right then, of course, she senses unicorns and realizes she's unarmed and doesn't know where Phil is. When she finally spots Phil it's after the unicorn sensation is fading, and there's this huge pepper haze in the air which is causing her problems but which is also detected by Gio, and they discover, has affected Seth badly when he shows up with Phil. Astrid, seeing the dishevelment of their clothing wonders if she's now the only remaining hunter in the park that night but Phil reassures her that she would never do that to Astrid.
Both of them are distracted by discovering a pile of unicorn corpses. They wonder who killed them and then Astrid realizes that the unicorns can actually kill each other.
Wherein Astrid Strikes a Chord
This chapter title is to be taken quite literally. Down in the common room trying to get past a headache which is caused by Rosamund's piano playing and the sympathetic vibes which the wall of first kills sets up, Astrid notes that Valerija's alicorn has been added along with Phil's, so she goes to look at them, touches each, and immediately notices that while Phil's kill is vibrant, Valerija's is completely dead. My immediate suspicion is that Valerija didn't kill a unicorn at all, but found a dead one and used that as her passport to the Cloisters. But she's clearly a hunter (as gaged by Bonegrinder's (non-)reaction, so why would she feel she needed such a passport?
So when Astrid tells Phil of the issue with the alicorns, they go back to the common room only to find Melissende and Grace bullying one of the other girls. The two Llewelyns take charge, Astrid takes an alicorn dagger from the weapons on the wall and later, Phil argues Neil into letting the girls go out on the town for an evening, to ease the pressure. Of course, she can't resist calling Seth, and when Gio gets on the phone and talks with Astrid, she's shocked at how mean and cruel he sounds. She decides she doesn't want to see him, but Phil won't let her stand him up.
Wherein Astrid revels in the night
So they meet up with Seth. Gio doesn't show. Seth suggest they go to a concert which happens to be close by the Cloisters. Seth's a jerk, so Phil discovers, and it's getting late, so they start walking home only to be attacked by a Re'em. It injures several of them but Astrid leaps on it with the dagger of Clothilde in her hand and rips its throat open. Several of the girls end up in the hospital and no one can contact Jaeger or the biopharm people.
Wherein Astrid Lies Low
The next morning Phil gets into an argument with Neil and Cory about the girls going out. Astrid says they should get rid of the body before it rots and the hell with turning it over to Jaeger, but she has no supporters with that suggestion either. She decides she's going to help Cory with her research, and she's handed a new report which has come in from the Vatican archives about a major battle against the unicorns in Jutland, which at that time had a queen. There actually was a Battle of Jutland, but not against unicorns!
Before Astrid can get into that, Valerija asks her to come and talk with Phil who has just returned from her date with Phil, and I immediately suspected that Phil is no longer a virgin.
Wherein Astrid Meets a Monster
Astrid takes off filled with hatred for Seth, but she's on foot and she can't make it out to where Seth is staying. She sits on a bench, tired, and finds herself in the presence of the Karkadann, but it doesn't kill her. It talks to her by means of mental images which Astrid cannot properly understand, but what she does discover is that this is Bucephalus who wants Astrid's aid in defeating the rogue unicorns. Bonegrinder shows up. Evidently she got loose. As Bucephalus approaches closer, the air around Astrid becomes harsh, like the pepper spray effect she encountered with the dead unicorns in the park that night. She thinks she will die from this poison, but she falls asleep
Wherein Astrid Awakens
She wakes the next day wondering if she dreamed everything, but Bonegrinder is still there, and now she has to smuggle her home without anyone seeing, and without Bonegrinder attacking innocent civilians. She still hurts from the exposure to the air around Bucephalus, but she fells better, and stronger. She falls asleep at the Cloisters only to be wakened by Phil hugging her and coming out with some bizarre story about what happened with Seth. The police are never called. Phil us talking like she can't tell if it was rape or not.
Wherein Astrid Uncovers the Enemy
Gio shows up at the Cloisters and Astrid is really pissed off with him. He tells her that he and Seth were hired to 'deflower' Astrid and Phil by someone who called himself uncle Alexander. Astrid divines that this person is Marten Jaeger, but she can't figure out why he would want to take herself and her cousin out of the picture. Astrid shares this with the other girls.
Wherein Astrid Clashes with Her Elders
Phil argues that they should bring in Lilith, Astrid's mom, to be the donna of the Cloisters since Neil is leaving to try and track down Jaeger, so Lilith shows up and turns out to be a real bitch and a jerk to boot. I can't believe Astrid puts up with her at all. She's unforgivably abusive of her daughter, but Astrid doesn't seem to find anything wrong with how she's treated. Astrid has been learning how tight is the bond between unicorn and hunter, and how the hunter's powers seem to be improved by close contact with the unicorns, but Lilith will hear none of this. She sends the girls out on a hunt, but it turns out to be a trap and the girls are badly mauled. Astrid is speared by a Kirin and she's seen to be carried away, the rest of them thinking she's dead, but she's saved by Bucephalus.
Wherein Astrid Puts the Pieces Together
Astrid spend part of the next morning slowly healing while she talks with Bucephalus, who explains what is going on. Jaeger has made an agreement with some of the Kirin, and is using them to cause problems while he is trying to find the remedy. Bucephalus explains that the extinction was no such thing, but was an agreement between Clothilde and the unicorns that they would each go into hiding and end the war.
Wherein Astrid Chooses Death and Life
After Bucephalus leaves, Astrid walks into the nearest village and calls Gio who comes to pick her up. He stays with her overnight while she heals some more, and she tells him everything. She realizes that she's now "dead" and could leave easily and start a new life with him, but she realizes she must go back and share what she's learned with the Cloisters girls.
Wherein Astrid Faces her Family
Gio drives her back and she arrives to find that Lilith has gone into meltdown over hear death and locked herself in the common room. Eventually, it's determined that Lilith will leave and Phil will take over as donna.
Wherein Astrid Attunes the Hunters
Astrid discovers that she can sit on the throne of alicorns in the common room now without getting a shock. Instead, she gets visions of the past. She realizes that the common room is a training room, not a souvenir stand, and all the girls, one by one, brave the chair. Each is empowered now with a mental link to the unicorns which is even more powerful than the 'unicorn sense' they had previously.
Wherein Astrid Prepares for Battle / Wherein Astrid Leads an Army
Valerija confesses that she was working for Jaeger - that he gave her the unicorn head she had showed up with (I knew it!) arrived with and she knows where he is. They set off in Gio's van (that he stole from his school) and head out to the graveyard on the outskirts of Rome. In the early morning, mist lying all around, they enter battle with the Kirins and the Karkadann arrives to aid them. Finally they beard Jaeger in his lair, Astrid wanting to spare his life because he says he has the remedy, but Bucephalus wants justice and Jaeger is killed. The novel ends with Gio agreeing that Astrid should stay a virgin because there's important work to be done although what, exactly, that is given what's happened here remains for vol 2 to reveal to us.
