The Lady and the Unicorn

by Ophelie

After fleeing the wreckage of a chaotic home life and a father's public unraveling, a young woman arrives in New York City with dreams of becoming a writer-and a desperate need to reinvent herself. But when she falls into a heady romance with an elusive man, what begins as passion quickly turns into something stranger, murkier, and harder to escape.

Set against the backdrop of dimly lit bars, fractured psyches, and the quiet ache of being young and broke in a city that doesn't care, The Lady and the Unicorn is an unflinching portrait of modern girlhood. Wry, vulnerable, and fiercely observant, it captures what it means to come of age in a time of instability-when survival means blurring the line between performance and truth, longing and self-destruction

176 pages, Kindle Edition

Expected publication February 7, 2026

Reviews

[romy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm rating this an extra star because despite what I am about to say, the book was incredibly gripping and I finished it within hours.

"The Lady and the Unicorn" is a novel about a woman in her early twenties who is launched into a psychotic break following a brief "situationship" with a man around her age. When their relationship concludes rather suddenly, the narrator begins to hear voices and hallucinate, believing that her ex-situationship, only referred to as "He" or "Him," is sending people in black vehicles to watch her to see if she is worthy of a relationship with him. The narrator struggles with poverty and poor familial relationships throughout the novel, touching briefly on her childhood and tragedies of her home life.

I struggled at times to understand the narrator's obsession with her "situationship." Many of her reactions felt extremely inflated especially because she will only have been seeing "Him" for three weeks total by the end of it all. At one point, "He" claims a conversation that the narrator cannot remember, and she "slam[s] [her] hands against the table" in a public restaurant (Ophelie 43). Objectively, this is a bit scary coming from anyone, and I wouldn't blame "Him" from being iffy about the relationship given this behavior. A relationship can be ended at any time, and the narrator and the male interest had never had a formal conversation making things official, and the entire duration of their romance was only three weeks. There are several instances like these where the narrator exhibits concerning and disproportionate behavior in response to events, and this severely affects my ability to sympathize with her as a reader.

I am under the impression that we are supposed to believe that the narrator has very little stability, struggles financially, and is low-contact with her immediate family. However, at times I don't believe the narrator is entirely reliable in the way she perceives the world around her and relays events to readers. She claims to be neglected by her family but her aunt offers genuine care to her several times, to which the narrator often assumes some sort of ulterior motive. Perhaps I'm supposed to assume that the narrator's disorder is causing these disparities, but it isn't clear on the page what is true and what isn't, and the ambiguity only succeeds in alienating the reader. I continued to read out of intrigue, not because I cared for the narrator or her success. This is a direct result of an unsuccessful use of context to justify her behavior and my inability to understand her motives and her beliefs, which felt entirely out of touch with reality.

I wonder if the story would have been more successful if the necessary context had been provided more efficiently, allowing readers to understand and sympathize with the MC's perspective even if they couldn't relate to the experiences themselves. I don't believe most readers have the background or perspective necessary to truly understand how a three-week situationship could launch the narrator into a hallucinatory psychotic break. We would require a much larger understanding of the narrator's stressors and childhood, as well as a better understanding of WHO the narrator is to feel any sort of sympathy for her. As she stands on the page, I don't truly understand her likes or dislikes, her personal voice, her views on the world. All I see is a young woman who is impulsive, struggling, perhaps a bit disillusioned, and disproportionately affected by the (unfortunately normal but shitty) actions of a man. I can relate to the stress and frustration of being in a situationship, but even still I cannot begin to grasp exactly why the narrator's mental state is so fragile that this could have affected her so deeply, and this severely disrupts my ability to enjoy the narrative.

This doesn't mean it isn't real or interesting; it means we need more context to be able to fully "buy in." Because I could not "buy in," the narrator came across as a bit ungrateful, selfish, entitled, and impulsive. I could not understand why she wouldn't be grateful for the help of her aunt, or why she would be so impulsive with her money by eating out in NYC when she can hardly pay her rent. Why did the narrator cut off the older man? If anything, she could have used his wealth to keep herself afloat or use his connections to become more successful in the writing sphere. I truly could not understand. I desired a stronger sense of the narrator's motivation. I want to understand why she did not care about her wellbeing or stability, but she did care about "Him." Why did he have such a large impact on her? Who was he to her, truly? Not just in terms of his name or title, but what did he represent on a symbolic level?

I love stories about obsessive, deviant women, but that is because I want to truly UNDERSTAND them and see them for who they are. I want to dive deep. All in all, we need more for this to work.

Additionally, there are several unrealistic strings of dialogue that completely pulled me out of the story. For instance, the narrator slices her finger open while at work, and when her coworker says that it will be quicker to walk to the ER, this is what follows:

"True," I said, then walked out the door, squeezing my finger as tight as possible. I laughed out loud at the absurdity, walking to the ER in the middle of Manhattan with a cut finger. It was so classic. (Ophelie 52)

Who would simply reply with "true" in a situation like this? Moments like these completely exaggerated the humor in the novel, undermining the severity of what was happening and bleeding into satirical terrain, which I don't believe was intentional based on the blurb and the majority of the novel. Another example takes place on page seventy-nine, when in response to an expensive gift given to her by the older man, the narrator says, "'Oh, Mark...you shouldn't have.'" This feels very derivative of rom-com language and unnatural within the confines of the story. I simply could not "buy in" with all of these strange and somewhat lazy exchanges. On page one hundred, the author writes, "'If I was in a situationship that long, I would kill myself in front of him,' I said." This is obviously a reference to a joke that is made frequently on social media, but it feels strange and jarring in this novel. Dialogue is simply incredibly inconsistent and I could never find my footing.

I did like the line, "I wondered if the only thing they could agree on was sex" on page seventy-eight. Very pretty and original.

Finally, there is one point when the narrator is visited on page fifty-two by a doctor at her place of work in a coffee shop. He warns her to look out for dreams with water. That very night, she dreams of water, but then the entire exchange is dropped. We receive no "resolution" or meaning regarding this exchange until page one hundred and twenty-one when the doctor returns and asks the narrator if she's seen any water. The narrator claims that she has not, but then dreams of water that night. It is only THEN that we are finally given that "deeper" meaning. It seems this event is used twice as a device within the novel, but the author forgot she had already included it in the first part of the book and tried it again. I was a bit disappointed by the lack of editing here; this should have been caught.

All in all, there are several errors within the digital copy that I purchased (Ex. "...we only catched the end of it" (Ophelie 32)). Pronouns are confused in several pages. Tone is inconsistent. There is an abundance of punctuation errors. Sentences are incredibly repetitive even within themselves (Ex. "I'd always been an avid walker, so soon the confinement of the psych ward was soon getting to me." (Ophelie 174)) OxyContin is confused with Oxytocin. It also felt the author was dating her book quite a bit by using internet references. I have a ton of notes on errors similar to these, but what I've gathered from them all is that there was little to no successful editing done on the book. The author began the draft in the beginning of the year and had completed the manuscript and published it by September (according to her social media), which tells me that she simply wanted to have a book "out there" and did not perform the thoughtful editing and planning necessary for a successful debut.

The story as a concept is incredibly compelling and is what allowed me to continue reading despite frustrations with the quality. I know the piece is autofiction, which is another reason why I could not put it down. There is definitely a market for literature like this, and I strongly recommend the author write a second draft and re-attempt publication, maybe even with a traditional publisher, as there is a ton of potential that is being neglected with the book in its current state. Self-publishing is great and can be incredibly lucrative for some authors, but it can also lead to situations like this one where an author neglects many aspects of editing and delivers a manuscript that deserves a bit more time to steep and untangle itself.

Citation:
Ophelie, The Lady and the Unicorn, The Temptation Press, 2025

[Stacey (Bookalorian) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Welcome to the Lit-indie Files. Where I take a chance on small/indie published books and bring you the inside scoop!!

I just finished The Lady and the Unicorn by Ophelie and here are my musings.

Running to a life not away should be the mantra of any young woman looking to reinvent themselves. The trouble is when you run head first into a man who brings the heat but keeps you at arms length.

Not knowing what is real and what is in her head, who do you run to? Who can protect you from the dangers real or imagined?

Loads to unpack here. It feels like reading a book a step away from it. There was nothing to connect to. A lack of use of names kinda keeps you at arms length. It was an interesting way to tell a story and kinda worked in some spots but others… I wondered why I kept reading. You need to connect. You have to feel something to keep the pages turning and the only thing that kept me reading was finding out what was real and what was not.

As a woman who has people in her life with BP… the Psychosis parts were wild. I don’t know if this is drawn from experience or whether she researched bipolar but in my experience this isn’t the norm and the catalyst didn’t really seem like something that would set a BP person on this trajectory so that was a little unsettling for me.

The writing definitely went waywire towards the end. It felt erratic and not well reasoned but still I kept turning those pages. There was a great underlying story here. I can see it. It just needs some editing. It needs someone else to work the kinks out and smooth the story a bit.

I could have used more being in psychosis, maybe her doing things that seemed normal as she is narrating it and people were acting like she was doing something out of this world crazy and then another POV to give us the reality. Maybe her living and not knowing what is real and what is not in an unreliable narrator way rather than the way it was done here.

It was unique and different but it still needs a bit of work.

3.5 stars rounded down

[Emily Holman · Rating 2 out of 5]

That was definitely a read that I was not expecting. There were parts that seemed unnecessary and confusing to me, or that did not make sense to me altogether, honestly, but that didn’t stop me from reading the whole thing in one night on intrigue alone.

The shift from what seemed to be a normal on again off again romance to a plunge into psychosis was like being thrown into a bath of ice. It was jarring and it took me a while to figure out what was going on— I almost couldn’t keep up, not knowing what was real or fake for the longest time, making it hard to unscramble while reading— but again, the thrill of not knowing what was going to happen next kept me going.

Some of the memory sequences were not separated, sometimes beginning in the same paragraph as the present happenings, and having to go back and figure out what was going on took me out of the story at times. There were also a handful of editorial errors that made me go back and try to figure out if there was context around them or if they were just mistakes, which left me confused and lost at times.

There were a couple of times in which the main character referred to “autistic” as being an insulting thing her family called her, lumping it in with a different word that is legitimately used as a slur, and the use of “autistic” as a “bad word”— as an autistic person— offended me to the point where I almost stopped reading.

Trigger warnings for SA, suicide, stalking, mental health decline, depression

[Nik · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like to step outside my usual genres from time to time, and the description of The Lady and the Unicorn sounded poetic, feminist, and a little tragic. Looking at it objectively, and not just because it isn’t something I’d normally pick, I didn't enjoy this.

The story follows an unnamed narrator who leaves her past behind to pursue her dream of becoming a writer in New York. The first half tracks her day-to-day life as she adjusts: her low-paying job, writer’s block, and relationships, intermixed with the telling of her past. It goes on like this for quite a while, and reads more like a diary or a collection of thoughts than an actual story. It felt like a lot of rambling at times and there's little to no indication of transitions between characters or scenes which made this hard to read without having to reorient yourself.

The second half is where things go completely off the rails. The long build-up of her life story and inevitable downfall from the first half now made more sense, but the abrupt shift into her downward spiral still left me feeling unprepared. You can see the writing on the wall, yet there’s no smooth transition before suddenly feeling like an entirely different story.

Without giving anything away, it makes you question what was real and what wasn’t. I don’t know enough about the mental health conditions portrayed here to comment on accuracy, but I did empathize with how difficult the struggle must be with those suffering with mental illness.

By the end, I wasn’t sure what I was meant to take away. While I can appreciate the ambition and themes the author aimed for, it didn't translate well onto paper. There are several sensitive topics covered, so I’d recommend checking trigger warnings before reading, especially regarding mental illness/mental health struggles.

I received a free copy of this book, but this review reflects my honest and unbiased opinion.

[Juliana · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think it has a very enticing premise, though the novel as whole feels a bit unpolished. The prose is very mechanical, and the story line a little jagged. It has some real potential