50 pages • 1 hour read
A. F. SteadmanSkandar and the Unicorn Thief
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
A wild herd of unicorns attacks an island village while a cameraman catches the attack on film. He knows that he will die, but he hopes that his footage will make it back to the Mainland so that people will know how dangerous unicorns really are.
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Thief”
It is the morning of the Chaos Cup, the biggest unicorn race of the year. Skander, his dad, and his sister Kenna all wake up excited for the big race. However, Kenna’s mood fades when she remembers that she failed the Hatchery exam and lost her chance to be a unicorn rider. While Kenna gets ready for the day, Skander and his dad talk about the race prospects, Skander’s dream of becoming a unicorn rider, and Skander’s friends—of whom he has few because he must regularly take care of his father.
The race begins, and Skander’s favorites—Aspen and her unicorn, New-Age Frost—start at the middle of the pack but quickly take the lead through displays of elemental magic. They win the race, but their victory is short-lived when the Weaver, a rider clad in all black except for their white mask, rides in on a wild unicorn and steals New-Age Frost. The stands descend into chaos; Skander and his sister do not know who the Weaver is, and their father does not enlighten them.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Locked Out”
After class and outside of school, Skander encounters Owen, a boy who often bullies him. Skander could walk away, but instead, he chooses to confront the bully who steals Chaos Cup cards from a younger child. Before Owen can harm Skander, Kenna steps in and scares Owen off. The two walk home together and find that their dad has deadbolted the door so that they cannot get in. Kenna apologizes for her negative attitude after failing her Hatchery exam and helps Skander to prepare for his own exam while they wait for their dad to open the door.
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Hatchery Exam”
The morning arrives for Skander to take his Hatchery Exam. Kenna and Skandar’s dad make him a special breakfast and then walk him downstairs. Before he leaves, Skander’s dad tells him that he must sit the exam even if someone tries to stop him. Skandar promises but expresses confusion—the Treaty demands all 13-year-olds take the Hatchery Exam. However, when Skander gets to school, his teacher says that he cannot take the exam because the Rider Liaison Office sent word that they will not allow Skander to do so. He waits at school all day and eventually goes home with Kenna.
At midnight, a unicorn rider claiming to be from the Rider Liaison Office comes and explains that Skander is a special case and did not need to take the exam because his schoolwork already proved his calling for the Island—the place where unicorn riders are trained. The rider sends him to pack while looking around worriedly; Kenna gives him a scarf that belonged to their mother and sends him off, jealous of his opportunity but also happy for him. He leaves his home after telling his father to be better for Kenna, and the rider takes him to her nearby unicorn.
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Mirror Cliffs”
Agatha and Skander ride her unicorn, Arctic Swansong, through the night to a place called Mirror Cliffs—a place that is challenging for all Mainlanders and many Islanders to navigate. She leaves him with instructions to blend in with the crowd and to say that he came in on the helicopter Blitzen. While he climbs the cliff, Agatha gets arrested for being in an unauthorized area. He finishes his climb and manages to carry out his goal—except for one individual who notices that he stands out. Bobby, who was in Blitzen, has a photographic memory and knows that Skander wasn’t in her helicopter. Before Skander can explain with a lie, the sun rises over the cliffs, and the process of testing new potential unicorn riders begins.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Tunnel of the Living”
The line moves forward, and Skander moves closer to the Hatchery door. His nerves begin to get the better of him, and he considers running back to the helicopter with other candidates for whom the Hatchery door did not open—his thought is that he can continue dreaming if he never knows whether he would have been allowed access. However, before long, he’s at the front of the line and is placing his hand on the door, which opens for him. In this moment, he is officially a unicorn rider, with his name carved into the wall of the Tunnel of the Living.
Once in the main chamber with the rest of the new riders, he meets Amber, an Islander who dislikes him on sight. Bobby steps in to deescalate the interaction, but she walks off before Skander can say any more. Not long afterward, the president of the Silver Circle, who is also the man in charge of security at the Hatchery, welcomes the new riders and reminds them that their unicorn partners are still violent by nature. Once the announcements are done, he and his employees take different selections of riders to find their destined unicorn. He explains that when they find the egg containing their unicorn, they must get into a Hatching cell quickly and not come out until they’ve secured their unicorn.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Scoundrel’s Luck”
The new unicorn riders rotate through the various unicorn eggs, testing whether the egg holds their destined unicorn by placing their hand on it for 10 seconds. If nothing happens, they move on; if the unicorn pierces their hand, they take the egg into a Hatching cell. Skander tries egg after egg until he finally finds his unicorn in the last batch.
He takes the egg into a cell and creates a nest for it using his hoodie and scarf. At first, nothing happens. Once Skander talks to the egg, though, it begins to move. An all-black unicorn emerges, sporting a white stripe on his head running from horn to snout. Skander befriends his unicorn, Scoundrel’s Luck, and it does not take longer for Skander to earn his unicorn’s trust and to secure it with the harness and lead rope. Nearby, Skander hears screams and goes to see if anyone needs help. Bobby is with one of the other boys and a girl who is screaming in a corner; she screams louder when she sees Skander’s unicorn.
Prologue-Chapter 6 Analysis
Steadman uses a short two-page prologue to set the tone for the book. Operating on the expectation that readers will already have a preconceived notion of what a unicorn is and does, she immediately works to separate her world’s unicorns from those of typical folklore. Unlike the standard, pleasant image of a unicorn, Steadman’s creatures are adorned with deliberately repulsive attributes such as “[r]ancid breath, rotting flesh, [and] the stench of immortal death” (1). Whereas the typical unicorn is a symbol of purity, the ones in the Skandar novels are more complicated, and discerning the layers requires readers to start Overcoming Ingrained Biases and expectations of their own in order to become fully immersed in the story. Told from the third-person limited point of view, the narrative only reveals Skandar’s thoughts and feelings, not those of his companions or antagonists, and Steadman therefore places many clues to the nuances of her world-building into Skandar’s interactions with those around him. While Skandar loves unicorns and wants to believe the best about them, many Islanders hold the belief that is explicitly stated in the Prologue: “[U]nicorns don’t belong in fairy tales; they belong in nightmares” (2).
Accordingly, the head of Hatchery security, Dorian Manning, warns the new riders that “even when bonded, [unicorns] are fundamentally bloodthirsty creatures with a preference for violence and destruction” (84). From the first moments on the Island, the author bombards both the protagonist—and, by extension, the reader—with a volley of the Islanders’ biases and beliefs that unicorns are dangerous and cannot be trusted. This belief extends not just to unicorns, but also to unicorn riders who do not fit the status quo, and this fear underlies the reasoning for the alienation that Skandar experiences once he is discovered to be a spirit wielder. In fact, many of the interpersonal conflicts that the main characters face are related to their ingrained biases and beliefs about unicorns and spirit wielders. However, Skandar’s unique perspective and outside experience demonstrate that not all spirit wielders are evil, just as not all unicorns are completely bloodthirsty. Yet these realizations are yet to occur, for the early chapters are meant to establish an understanding of the biases that the characters must grow to overcome once they have had a chance to build their own experiences. This process of growth creates both external and internal conflicts that drive the plot of the novel forward.
Steadman also begins foreshadowing the end of the novel in Skandar’s first journey through the Tunnel of the Living, for once he gains access to this place, he is able to read the names of many unicorn riders, including “ROSIE HISSINGTON, ERIKA EVERHART, ALIZEH MCDONALD” (80) and many more. Mentioning these names early allows Steadman to sprinkle additional clues to her world-building and her overarching vision for the story, and it also allows her to hint at a much deeper history of unicorn riders who also started their journey at the Hatchery door. In this moment, therefore, Skandar joins a long and proud tradition of riders who work together to protect the Island and the Mainland from wild unicorns. However, the scene also serves the deeper purpose of presenting the first subtle clue to the story’s resolution, for although none of these names yet hold any significance to either the protagonist or the reader, one of the names is particularly important because it is the name of a rider whom everyone believes to be dead—Erika Everhart. As implied by the name of the tunnel itself, however, every name here listed is the name of a living rider, so it follows logically that Erika Everhart lives. Though the name may seem insignificant in this early chapter, it gains significance when Skandar later remembers her name when his friends discuss her supposed death.
Skandar and the Unicorn Thief is a middle-grade bildungsroman novel. One of the markers of a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, is the growth that the main character goes through from the beginning of the story to the end. To trace the main character’s growth, authors must establish the type of person the main character is before they go on their adventures. Accordingly, Steadman uses these chapters to establish the type of person that Skandar tries to be. For example, the first chapter characterizes his lack of confidence in social situations: an attribute that many readers—younger and older—will be able to relate to quite easily. As the narrative states, “Whenever Skandar tried to think of something clever or funny to say, his brain jammed. It’d come to him a few minutes later, but face-to-face with a classmate, there’d just be a weird buzzing in his head, a blankness” (8). As this passage illustrates, the first full chapter establishes Skandar as a timid teenager who gets picked on by his peers because he does not fit in with them. When he gets to the Island, he’s equally unsure of himself and fearful of others’ reactions to him. His initial interactions with others show his desire to create alliances, for he clearly worries about being labeled as different from his peers. Ironically, this happens anyway when Scoundrel’s Luck is discovered to have an uncommon white stripe on his forehead—the mark of a spirit unicorn. To succeed on his journey and complete the growth promised by the bildungsroman story structure, Skandar needs to overcome both his inability to interact successfully with others and his timidity about being different.
