Unicorns in the Rain

by Barbara Cohen

Book Overview

An invitation from a stranger on a train takes Nikki to unicorns and the boarding of an ark.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0689307357
• ISBN13: 9780689307355
• Release Date: January 1980
• Publisher: Atheneum Books
• Length: 164 Pages
• Weight: 2.20 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Treasured Memories

I wish so very much this book were in print!! I would buy copies for myself and every child who has been and will be born into my family for generations to come. I remember very clearly the first time I read this book. I was only ten years old at the time, and a voracious reader. Having dumped my overwhelmingly large pile of library books on the counter connecting my bedroom and washroom, I idly reread the rear cover of "Unicorns in the Rain" while standing there listening to something my mother was saying. I opened the book, read the first page, and was hooked. I didn't even get the three steps from my washroom into my room! I sat down on the toilet seat cover and began. Long after midnight, and after I had slid from toilet seat to bath mat, I closed the book. From the time I was old enough to appreciate the impact this story had on my childhood, I have been searching for it. I even went back to my childhood library to ask if I could buy it, but they had long since taken it from circulation. I will forever treasure the memories of this book, and I will continue hoping that the publisher recognizes the gem it has and decide to gift a new generation with this classic tale of magic...

fond memories

Oh, how I wish this book were in print! I was thirteen when I read it, and it still haunts me. It is basically the story of a young runaway who meets an intriguing man, only to find that his family is what we might call these days a "survivalist cult", and they're convinced that the Great Flood is coming. Like Noah and his family, they are amassing two of each animal, and they've even found a unicorn. All they need now is its mate.And it keeps on raining. Are they right in their predictions? Will they find the second unicorn, and what happens if they do? _Unicorns in the Rain_ is a sad, haunting, beautiful book that I hope I can read again someday.

a rather alarming memory

I think I read this in Junior High--at the time I found it very disturbing, just because of the portrayal of sex and the drug culture (and the fact that the one girl wasn't sure who her baby's father was--at the time I had never heard of such a thing!) I do remember it as a powerful story. Unlike the reviewer below, I never considered it a futuristic novel--I thought all along that it was about the Biblical Noah. Just a different take on it--sure, they had cars and stuff before the flood, right, and then they were all destroyed. Made sense to me!

haunting

I have to agree with a previous review I too read this book many years ago and have been hunting for my own copy ever since then. It has been more than 15 years for me and some of the images in the story are still as vivid to me now as they were when I first read them. A very good read and very sad.

Young adult fantasy for everyone

I read Unicorns in the Rain nearly ten years ago and the story is still fresh in my mind. This book tackles a future where humanity has lost all hope and one woman unwittingly finds herself thrown in with a family who believes that the world will be flooded as it was in biblical times. This family has collected two of every animal, including two unicorns. Since this book was, I feel, originally written for the younger crowd the prose is simple and the novel short and direct, but withing the few pages is a tale that has haunted me for ten years with its tragic view on a possible future for our world and the fate of fantasy's most beloved animals.