Book Review: Sophia's Invitation by Random House

 

I quite like the Unicorn Academy Netflix show, so when I saw this book I bought it and gave it a read. Spoilers ahead.

Oddly enough this book doesn't seem to have an attributed author.

Sophia is a girl who gets an invitation to attend a special academy: Unicorn Academy, a place of magic and fantastical creatures. Here, she meets the unicorn Wildstar and her new friends. But when a villainess named Ravenzella is on the rise, Sophia will have to unite with her friends and bond with her unicorn in order to save the Academy and the entire island. 

It's honestly just a fine book, a pretty straightforward adaptation of the show's pilot movie. It has some neat characters, good morals for the kids, some nice concepts and fun fantasy stuff, and a pretty solid adventure to set up future events in the show (and possibly future book installments?). It's nothing grandiose or anything, but for what it is, it does its job well. If you're in for a simple but fun fantasy adventure, I do recommend this one.

Where I do have an issue is that the book isn't very descriptive. Sure, there's illustrations, plus I've seen the Netflix show, so obviously I know what these characters and the locations they inhabit look like. But if I had to go on just the text of this book...yeah, I'd have a pretty hard time imagining what some of these characters and locations looked like because the descriptions are pretty bare bones. 

The pacing is also quite fast, and as a result I don't feel we get to know the characters very well. I get it, it's an adaptation of the pilot movie so obviously it's setting up stuff for future episodes/books, but I'd be lying if I said I got very invested in these characters based on the pilot movie or this book alone. They're pretty simple and bare bones here and while not bad, they could've been more interesting. Even Sophia as our main lead I don't find that engaging, aside from her father's backstory. 

So yeah, not a bad book, but a bit simple and fast-paced and not super in-depth. It's fine for younger readers and I'm sure some older readers such as myself can enjoy it as well, but don't expect this to be great or anything. The main draw of this book, similar to the show, really is the fun and engaging setting and the fantastical concepts it throws at the reader (or watcher). Ravenzella is also not a bad villain, but she does get defeated (at least for the time being) pretty quickly.

Rating: 3.5/5