Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

My second review is of Jacqueline K. Ogburn’s The Unicorn in the Barn, which I finished reading aloud to my 8-year-old on our cruise.  (Britt had recommended it to me for my second girlie, but the 8-year-old is even more animal obsessed, and so I made it one of the choices last time it was time to start a new read-aloud, and that’s what she picked.)  I don’t know that we’ll pick such a long one again–my youngest is very I-have-to-be-in-the-mood-to-be-read-to–but it worked about as well as the book itself did, which is to say, pretty well.  I liked it fine but didn’t quite love it, and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why. 

Eric is likeable, after all, and his living situation–widowed father, older brother–may be incredibly relatable for boy readers, since the author described it very believably.  The magical animals part of the story isn’t terribly explained, but since the premise is more or less that the book takes place in our world and magical animals exist in it, I don’t know that it has to be.  None of the characters felt as thoroughly developed as I wanted them to be, but that may be that the book just skews younger, despite its 290 pages.  (They are illustrated pages, to be fair, and the font isn’t small.)  I honestly think part of my problem was that I liked the premise but wanted it to feel more as if, say, Gary D. Schmidt wrote it.  (Allegra, the neighbor/sort of boss/sort of coworker/sort of friend also annoyed me a bit.)  Ultimately, this is a perfectly fine book about a boy facing serious family changes who discovers that unicorns (and other magical animals) are real and his new neighbor is a vet who treats them (with her daughter as assistant).  I suppose the writing just–for whatever reasons–didn’t grab me.  If you have unicorn fans in your house, though, it’s definitely worth a look.  Tell me what YOU think!