Children's author and artist Michael Hague's gorgeous illustrations featuring unicorns are gathered in this beautiful picture book anthology, with a poem or a quotation from a longer work about unicorns paired with each painting. Snippets from Auden and Shakespeare, poems from Ann Santinho and Ella Young, quotations from works such as Robert Brown's 1881 The Unicorn: A Mythological Investigation and Georgess McHargue's 1968 The Beasts of Never—these and other selections are paired with the beautiful artwork, offering just a taste of the unicorn lore out there...

Published in 1999, Michael Hague's Magical World of Unicorns is very much a vehicle for the artist's work, rather than a proper story or poetry anthology. It certainly highlights many of Hague's gorgeous unicorn paintings, and the visuals here are more than worth seeking out, for their own sake. That being said, the snippets and quotations presented are also intriguing, with many authors and works known to me, and a few which were not. I appreciated the diversity of selections on offer, from German folk songs, medieval accounts, a hymn to Buddha, modern fantasies and non-fiction, and poetry. Hague created an earlier pop-up book with a similar name, back in 1986 (Michael Hague's World of Unicorns), that I have decided to seek out, to compare and contrast to this later picture book. As for this one, I would recommend it to unicorns lovers young and old, and fans of the artist. ( )