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.
Themes
Exploring and Expanding Family Bonds
Skandar and the Unicorn Thief displays two distinct family dynamics: the family of origin and the chosen family. Steadman uses Skandar’s two traditional family members—his sister and his father—to demonstrate the challenges and successes of both types of relationships. Furthermore, the value of these bonds plays a key role in Skandar’s success and coming-of-age story. Steadman starts in the early chapters by establishing the nuances of Skandar’s relationships with his family of origin, particularly his interactions with his sister, Kenna. He maintains a close relationship with Kenna, primarily because of their bonding over unicorn riding and their dependence on each other to persevere through their father’s depressive episodes. When Kenna fails the Hatchery exam, Skandar loses part of that vital connection, so when he has an opportunity to rekindle this bond, he is excited. As the narrative states, “Skandar’s heart was singing, even though Kenna was insisting Aspen and Frost wouldn’t win. She hadn’t talked about unicorns for so long he’d almost forgotten what it felt like” (5). This scene makes it clear that he craves a continued connection with his sister because even though they have a traditional family bond, she is also part of his chosen family.
Unlike Skandar’s bond with his sister, his bond with his father is strained. After his mother’s death, his father becomes isolated and now distances himself from both of his children. Skandar laments one of the primary challenges here when the narrative states, “The trouble was that looking after Dad when he wasn’t well—not so happy—meant that Skandar missed out on a lot of the ‘normal’ stuff you were supposed to do to make friends” (8). Skandar loves his father, but the relationship presents challenges that hinder Skandar’s own character development before primary events of the novel utterly change his world. His familial bond with his father makes it impossible for him to maintain stable friendships. At times, the effort to care for his father drags him down. He lacks confidence, and his father does little to build him back up.
However, both family members remain important to Skandar, and Steadman uses these bonds to imply that although the bonds of chosen family and the bonds of blood relationships hold different places in a person’s heart, both play a vital role in their continued growth. This concept comes to the forefront in the final confrontation with the Weaver. When considering who he is, Skandar knows that “[h]e was a spirit wielder, but he was also Skandar Smith from Margrate, who loved his sister and his dad, even though sometimes loving Dad was hard. […] He was a good person. And he’d never join the Weaver—even if she happened to be his mum” (402-03). This moment reveals a new twist on familial relationships as Skandar consciously renounces his blood relationship with his mother. When faced with the choice, he chooses the family that stays with him and pushes away the family that rejected him.
Overcoming Ingrained Biases
The dynamic between Skandar and Mitch embodies the challenge of overcoming ingrained biases. Mitch remains caught in the trappings of what his father wants, while Skandar tries to make Mitch see that there are other ways and other choices. Steadman works to show that it’s easier to talk about overcoming biases than it is to do so in practice. She expresses this through two specific scenes between Skandar and Mitch. The first scene is in Chapter 11, and the second scene is in Chapter 15. By expressing hate for Skandar, Mitch is simply trying to echo his father’s beliefs, thereby striving to be the son his father wants him to be. When Skandar tells Mitch, “You don’t have to hate me, you know. Just because your dad wouldn’t like us being friends. You’re allowed to have different opinions,” all Mitch can say in response is “No, I’m not” (190). With this exchange, it is clear that Mitch faces an internal conflict: He wants to be friends with Skandar but struggles to balance the person he wants to be with the person his father expects him to be. He also struggles to overcome his own biases about spirit wielders because he has never been exposed to people with other perspectives and views about this forbidden category of unicorn rider. However, this brittle belief changes when he meets Skandar, who embodies the type of spirit wielder that Mitch’s father believes cannot exist: a moral and ethical one. Ultimately, Mitch resists change not because he wants to believe that Skandar is evil, but because he still cannot let go of his biases.
However, after Skandar defends Mitch in Chapter 13, Mitch realizes that his father was wrong. Rather than allowing his biases to dictate how he feels about Skandar, Mitch considers what it might mean to be friends with the spirit wielder he knows, rather than opposing the imaginary spirit wielder that his father created in his mind. His apology to Skandar for his poor behavior expresses his sincere desire to make amends and signals his willingness to change and improve himself in a much broader sense. As Mitch says of his father, “Just because he hates spirit wielders, it doesn’t mean that I have to hate them too. I understand that now. And I know you, and you’re nice, so it makes me think that maybe I was wrong about the others” (299).
In this exchange, Mitch doesn’t pretend that his earlier actions and treatment of Skandar were justified. Instead, he acknowledges that he was in the wrong. However, more importantly, he recognizes that he needs to do more than change how he sees Skandar. By recognizing that Skandar may be different from his warped understanding of a spirit wielder’s true nature, he also acknowledges that he has to change his entire view of spirit wielders in general. Through Mitch, Steadman encourages readers to regularly challenge their own biases in life and reconsider what they believe they know about the world around them.
The Weight of Keeping Secrets
One of Skandar’s greatest obstacles to self-growth lies in the secrets that he keeps from his friends and the people around him. The weight of the secrets he keeps continues to build to the extent that he loses progress in his own development because he cannot escape his own deceptions and become the person he is meant to be. The lies start from the moment he arrives on the Island and follow him until he finally repairs the bond between Aspen McGrath and New-Age Frost in the climax of the novel.
The first lie that Skandar tells is to an Island official about how he arrived on the island in the first place. At Agatha’s instruction, he tells one of the officials that he arrived in the helicopter Blitzen. While the official checks her list, “[h]e stared at the top of her pencil, hardly daring to believe that he might actually pull this off” (70). The scene reveals that up until this point, he has little practice with lying to people who will notice (unlike his father, who would completely miss his small lies of omission). Now, faced with the threat of discovery, he becomes nervous, and his nerves increase when Bobby calls out his lie. Even though she knows he’s lying, the “white-hot panic that was sweeping through Skandar must have been obvious, because Bobby put her hand back in her pocket” (72). In these first stages, the weight of lying, while nerve-wracking, is still relatively easy for Skandar to bear because he has not yet told many lies and has yet to experience the deeper burden of hiding himself and his identity as a spirit wielder.
As the novel progresses, Skandar’s lies build and become much heavier. Eventually, he tries to break free by being more himself in Chapter 16, telling Joby that he wants to use limited amounts of his spirit magic. When Joby says he must hide it, Skandar retorts: “It’s difficult, okay? You don’t understand! […] You never had to hide the spirit element. You never had to stop your unicorn from using it. It’s not as easy as just blocking it” (325). The burden of his secrets becomes too much to bear, and he begins to lose control of both himself and his emotions when he must continue to keep secrets from those around him. The tension that Steadman creates at this moment is designed to reflect the real tension that individuals can feel when their lies pile up around them. In the end, Skandar finally frees himself from the lies by exposing his own status as a spirit wielder to Aspen. Despite the risk, he knows that he is doing the right thing. As he tells Aspen:
Because I’m not the Weaver […] and that’s been your mistake with the spirit wielders all along. You think we’re all like the Weaver, but we’re not. I want to help you because it’s the right thing to do. Because you and New-Age Frost belong together (415).
By letting himself do what’s right, even at the risk of being jailed and losing his future as a unicorn rider, Skandar feels the weight of his lies lifting. He no longer bears the burden and can breathe easier. This final revelation emphasizes the saying that the truth sets people free, and thus, the novel’s climax encourages readers to grow like Skandar does and tell the truth rather than continue to bear the weight of lying.
