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Reviewed by:
  • Do You Believe in Unicorns? by Bethanie Deeney Murguia
  • Sarah Sahn
Murguia, Bethanie Deeney Do You Believe in Unicorns?; written and illus. by Bethanie Deeney Murguia. Candlewick, 2018 [32p]
ISBN 978-0-7636-9468-5 $14.99
Reviewed from galleys R* 3-6 yrs

A white equine wearing a red stovepipe hat that sits just where a unicorn's horn would is probably not a unicorn. It's much more likely that it's a horse having a bad hair day, or it wants to stay dry in the rain. After all, why would a unicorn want to disguise itself? Kids will giggle as the unseen narrator offers increasingly ridiculous reasons why this is not a unicorn but a horse wearing a hat, as the animal in question traipses across soft watercolor fields and trots through the desert trailing butterflies and flowers. More equines appear in hats—a cowboy hat for one, a pointed witch's hat for another—but when the hats come off, no certainty is delivered, as the art leaves things teasingly ambiguous: is that a unicorn horn sticking out of its forehead, or is it just a building spire in the backgrounded city? The narrator's tongue-in-cheek obliviousness slides easily into an affirmation of the power of imagination that's most effectively conveyed in the final illustration, where a tiny dragon sits outside the unicorn's barn. Strong outlines give definition to the soft washes of the ink and watercolor art, and the unicorn's expressive side-eye lets the reader know just what it thinks of the narrator's speculations. The musing text, with its questions posed to the audience, will be a hit at storytime or during a lapsit, and the invitation to believe the impossible makes this a wonderful segue into encouraging kids to make up their own fantasy stories.

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