The New York Times reviewer Basil Davenport noted that while "Sturgeon's poetic sensitivity sometimes leads him to overwriting, … at his best it gives his work an emotional depth which is all too rare in this field."[1]Boucher and McComas gave the collection a lukewarm review, describing it as "a hodgepodge" mixing "Grade A Sturgeon stories" with "a good many one can see no particular reason for collecting"; still, they concluded that Unicorn was "a book belonging in any fantasy library."[2]P. Schuyler Miller praised the collection as "one of the finest short story collections by any writer in the field."[3]