By Julie Sykes
A boarding school where every girl is handed her own unicorn and has to bond with it before the year is out.
Sophia arrives at Unicorn Academy on Unicorn Island, where each girl is paired with a unicorn of her own, and the two of them have to truly bond by the end of the year or be split up. Sophia gets Rainbow. She is impatient and headstrong, Rainbow has opinions too, and the bonding does not go smoothly. Then Sparkle Lake, the source of all the island's magic, starts turning a strange color, and things begin going wrong across the school. Sophia and Rainbow sneak into the woods they were told to stay out of to find out why. Around a hundred pages, short chapters, line drawings throughout, and the first of a very long series.
This is the one an obsessed seven-year-old asks for by name, and there's nothing wrong with wanting it. Boarding school plus a unicorn of your very own is a fantasy aimed straight at a unicorn-mad six- or seven-year-old. The writing is plain and quick, the chapters are short, and the plot is one clean problem with one clean solution, so a child who has only just started on real chapter books can finish it in two nights and feel enormous about it. There are a dozen of these, a Nature Magic run after them, and a Netflix show your child has probably already found. If it takes, you're set for a good long while.