Rapunzel

Surely among the most original and gifted of children's book illustrators, Paul O. Zelinsky has once again with unmatched emotional authority, control of space, and narrativecapability brought forth a unique vision for an age-old tale. Few artists at work today can touch the level at which his paintings tell a story and exert their hold.

Zelinsky's retelling of Rapunzel reaches back beyond the Grimms to a late-seventeenth-century French tale by Mlle. la Force, who based hers on the Neapolitan tale Petrosinella in a collection popular at the time. The artist understands the story's fundamentals to be about possessiveness, confinement, and separation, rather than about punishment and deprivation. Thus the tower the sorceress gives Rapunzel here is not a desolate, barren structure of denial but one of esoteric beauty on the outside and physical luxury within. And the world the artist creates through the elements in his paintings the palette, control of light, landscape, characters, architecture, interiors, costumes speaks to us not of an ugly witch who cruelly imprisons a beautiful young girl, but of a mother figure who powerfully resists her child's inevitable growth, and of a young woman and man who must struggle in the wilderness for the self-reliance that is the true beginningof their adulthood.

As ever, and yet always somehow in newly arresting fashion, Paul O. Zelinsky's work thrillingly shows us the events of the story while guiding us beyond them to the truths that have made it endure.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Dutton Books for Young Readers
Published: 10/01/1997
ISBN: 9780525456070
Pages: 48
Weight: 1.06lbs
Size: 12.38h x 9.32w x 0.39d
Award: Caldecott Medal - Winner
Award: Bookseller's Choice - Winner

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 09/29/1997 pg. 89
Kirkus Review - Children 10/01/1997 pg. 1540
School Library Journal 11/01/1997 pg. 113
New York Times 11/16/1997 pg. 54
SLJ's Best Books 12/01/1997 pg. 29
ALA Notable Children's Books 01/01/1998 pg. 1224
Hornbook Guide to Children 07/01/1997 pg. 115 - Outstanding, Noteworthy In Style
Booklist 11/15/1997 pg. 559
School Library Journal 12/01/1997
School Library Journal 11/01/1997

Accelerated Reader Quiz #/Name: 29284 / Rapunzel
Reading Level: 4.6 / Interest Level: Lower Grade / Point Value: 0.5