PHOEBE AND HER UNICORN: Unicorn Theater makes me think Dana Simpson’s gotten better at the graphic-novel pacing since her earlier The Magic Storm. Phoebe and her unicorn BFF Marigold are heading to summer camp but to Phoebe’s surprise, Marigold’s traveling with her sister Florence; much as Phoebe reminds herself it’s only fair to share her buddy, she finds herself getting jealous. Light but engaging.
As a fan of the L. Sprague deCamp/Fletcher Pratt Harold Shea books, I had high hopes for deCamp’s THE UNDESIRED PRINCESS, which has another modern-day American sucked into a portal fantasy. In this case he ends up the designated monster-slayer in a world run by binary logic — not in the computer sense but in having everything divided with no middle ground. There’s blue and yellow but no green; people are either virtuous or villainous, with no moral ambiguity; the landscape switches from mountains to plains without any intermediate zone such as foothills
What sunk this was that the protagonist is mopey and grouchy: he doesn’t like having to have adventures, grumbles constantly about the strangeness of the world and doesn’t at all like the beautiful and perfectly charming princess he’s supposed to wed (until the end when he suddenly discovers she’s wonderful). He’s not at all interesting. David Drake’s The Enchanted Bunny, which was added in to fill out the volume, is a great deal funnier in its story of a modern man turned portal-fantasy monster slayer.
The seventh collection of LAZARUS by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark is less than overwhelming. We get two chapters dealing with Jonah Carlyle’s redemption, largely lost on me as I didn’t remember who he was, then a big conference between the Carlyles — including our protagonist, the “lazarus” Forever — and the head of House Hock. Which leads to the reveal everything that was going on is rooted in a second-rate melodrama from years ago. Perversely this makes me want to go back to the early volumes and figure out why they worked for me.
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