Zel

This was a really wonderful retelling of Rapunzel: it makes sense and shows characters motivations. Rapunzel and her prince are lovable and interesting, and the "witch" is not so much spiteful as desperate. Though the author's style irked me a bit at first, I fast found myself intrigued and loving

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it long before I realized that this is a retelling of Rapunzel.

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A retelling of the Rapunzel story. This flitted around from character to character, changing voice and point of view so often it felt like running downhill. The use of present tense added to that rushing feeling, even though the story covers a long period of time. It was interesting to hear the

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witches voice, her obsessive wishing for a child, and the length she was willing to go to keep her daughter's love. I enjoyed reading it, but I prefer meatier retellings.

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Zel, by Donna Jo Napoli, is a re-telling of the classic fairytale, Rapunzel. I admit that when I started reading Zel, I expected a light fluffy story. I also admit that it had been a very long time since I've read the fairytale version. I should have refreshed my memory.

In Zel, Rapunzel is a young

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girl living a very happy life with Mother. She knows that Mother has a special gift with plants but she doesn't know the extent of her abilities or the reason she has the gift in the first place. When Zel meets a young count on one of her rare trips into the village, she expresses a desire to ultimately marry and have children of her own. Mother's fear of losing Zel is so great that she locks her in a tower. The story continues as Zel begins to lose her mind due to her confinement and lack of companionship. She is not aware that the count has been searching for her for years.

I didn't expect some of the darker elements of the story. There was a great deal of madness in Mother's attempts to protect her child and keep her with her forever. Zel's own madness is more understandable because of her circumstances. This morning I read Rapunzel by Paul O. Zelinsky for comparison and recognize many of the same elements to the story. What Ms. Napoli does is expand on everything to give us an understanding into everything.

Zel is a wonderfully written novel length re-telling of the classic. While it is a children's book, I definitely recommend it for young teens or older. There are adult situations later in the story and it may bring up questions. I recommend it very highly and also encourage you to pick up another version of the story to make your own comparisons. Mr. Zelinsky's gorgeous book won the Caldecott Medal and his illustrations are stunning.

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A gentle, heart-rending retelling of the Rapunzel story. As Zel approaches puberty, she finds herself removed from the freedom of the country life she has known, and confined to a stone tower. As the years go by, the memory of a boy she met at the village stays fresh in her mind as her other

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memories begin to fade. Zel's mother has a reason - an other-worldly reason - for the things she does. The reasons aren't specifically spelled out; but there is an undertone of evil that hangs vaguely over the story.

The story is well-told, although I'm not fond of present-tense narrative. The point of view varies between Zel, Mother, and Konrad. Mother's narrative is first-person, but the others' minds are open to us, so we see every thought. The story is very well-woven, and the ending is powerful. Just wish it wasn't first-person. Recommended.

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Zel is the very creative retelling of the fairy tale classic, 'Rapunzel." In Napoli's version Zel and her mother live in isolation in the Swiss countryside, far away from human contact. Mother does her very best to give Zel everything she needs in the hopes of binding Zel to her forever. As her

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daughter reaches maturity mother realizes Zel will have an important decision to make, marry and raise a traditional family, or follow in her mother's footsteps and sell her soul to become a witch. Afraid Zel will make the "wrong" decision Zel's mother locks Zel in the tower everyone knows from the traditional story. Napoli does a clever job at including small details from the original story including the obsession with lamb's lettuce.
The very first thing I noticed about this book was its voice structure. Zel is told from the point of view of three different characters: Zel (in third person present), Konrad (in third person present), and Zel's mother (oddly enough, in first person present). In the beginning I wanted to complain about it, but by the end of the third chapter I found it ingenious. Through Zel's mother's thoughts you get the incredibly twisted psychology of love and obsession. The story wouldn't have been as dark and dangerous if all voices were the same. We needed to see mother's reasoning for locking Zel away in the tower. This psychological insight allowed us see the story from a different angle and not lean on the original story of Rapunzel.

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Zel is the retelling of the class fairy tale Rapunzel but this book isn't for kids. It's a deep look at what can happen when natural human longings become evil. Set in 16th-century Switzerland, the book alternates between prince Konrad, Zel, and Zel's mother's point of view. The book answers all

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the questions that the original Grimm's story never answered for us. Why did that witch want Rapunzel in the first place? How did she get her up in the tower if there was no door? Why didn't Rapunzel hate her mother for causing her to become a lonely prisoner? The book expounds upon the utter isolation and realistically portrays the dismal effects on Zel's spirit from being locked away in a tower. This book will cause you to think on a deeper level than you ever have before about an old, familiar tale. It's truly romantic but at times dark.

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I really loved how personal this story is. It basically just deals with the three characters, Rapunzel, Mother, and Konrad. The changes in perspective throughout the story were nice. And the evolution of the relationship between Zel and her mother was very interesting to read. I also enjoyed the

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depiction of Zel's feelings while she was in the tower, it was very realistic.

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Zel by Donna Jo Napoli (1998) is a retelling of the traditional tale of Rapunzel which originally comes from Italy. Zel is a cheerful teen who sees the positives in everything. Her mother is very different than Zel often focusing on the dangers in life. These fears lead Zel's mother to lock her

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away in a tower until these "dangers" are gone. The story is written using beautiful descriptive language. The reader is continuously engaged hearing from each characters point of view as the chapters change.

In a classroom I would use this story of Rapunzel along with other stories for students to read and compare. It is important for students to read different versions of the same story to see how authors can write. This can help students make decisions in their own stories.

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Another retelling that demonstrates Napoli's ability to make the "villain" a real person whose actions we do not condone but with whom we can definitely empathize. I found the Mother's obsession quite realistic, and I appreciated that Rapunzel was not just another damsel in distress.

4 stars

Well told version of the Rapunzel story but made more complete by including narratives of Zel, her mother, and Count Konrad. Why did her mother trap her in the tower? Was it only to keep her from contact with men or was there something more?

I loved this book! It is still my favorite, despite the books I have read since. I like how the story is told from different characters' points of view, it helps the reader understand each character's motivations. I love the retelling of old, beloved stories, and this does that very well.

I loved this book! It is still my favorite, despite the books I have read since. I like how the story is told from different characters' points of view, it helps the reader understand each character's motivations. I love the retelling of old, beloved stories, and this does that very well.

When I was a teenager, ages 14 through 17, I lived a half-mile from a library branch. Nearly every weekend and once or twice a week during summers, I rode my bike down and grabbed as many books as would fit in my basket. There was a set of bookcases adjoining the adult genre fiction that was marked

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"YA", and during those three years, I started at the A's on one end and worked my way to Jane Yolen at the other end - I was especially interested in historical fiction and fairy tale retellings, and I must have read every single one at least twice even as I worked my way through all the books available there.

Donna Jo Napoli was an interesting author - she wrote a few fairy tales that were interesting, but didn't quite appeal in the way some other authors' did, but I kept finding myself picking her books off the shelf anyway. I always thought of her as a favorite, then wondered why I thought that when I finished the books. I'm not sure I can pinpoint why I disliked them as a teenager, but a decade and a half on, I found myself doing the same thing. At a library book sale, I stuck Zel into my $10 sack, and planned to keep it for my nostalgic rereading phases. It took me a while to get around to it, but eventually I did, and I think I can say why this book seems like it would be right amongst my favorites, yet isn't.

The story of Zel is a fairly faithful retelling of the Grimms' "Rapunzel" tale. There's a witch who bargains with a neighbor - leafy rapunzel greens for the pregnant wife, and the baby will be the witch's. When the baby grows up, she's stuck in a tower all alone, until a young prince happens to ride by and discovers the secret of how the witch goes up. He does the same, impregnates the young woman, and when the witch finds out, he's thrown into thorns and blinded, while meanwhile the young woman gives birth to twins, and when he finds her, her tears cure his blindness.

Where Napoli makes this story unique is in placing it in Calvinist Switzerland in the mid-1500s and by putting half the book in the witch's point of view. The setting is not particularly relevant, except that it adds flavor to the story and gives the witch and the prince a little context behind their choices. The witch's point of view, however, is what makes this story. Zel and the prince aren't particularly interesting (Zel is a sweet-natured peasant girl who loves her mother and loves animals; the prince is privileged and obsessed with the blonde girl who calmed his horse), and as children with limited knowledge, they mostly serve to illustrate the consequences of the witch's actions. The witch has never wanted anything more than to be Mother, and her life revolves around playing that role towards Zel and raising Zel - just the two of them, alone. Through her POV, we explore selfish love and sacrifice, and outright jealousy over Zel belonging to anyone else once she grows up.

Mother has no name except that, and she is a witch because she bargained with the devil for supernatural powers in order to become a mother - which she did through the usual Rapunzel way. This bargaining plays into her reasons for locking Zel into a tower, but it was never satisfactory for me. It was somehow secondary to other plot elements and never quite explained, rather like Napoli knew she had to hit certain marks in the Rapunzel tale and used the demons as the excuse. It's much more interesting to see the psychological changes in Mother as she realizes Zel is growing up and may leave her one day, and likewise Zel's own growth into a young woman. Unfortunately, Zel's growing up is also a bit perfunctory and odd, and the insanity induced by solitary confinement in the tower doesn't help it make any more sense when she's suddenly attracted to the prince and interested in sex, despite never having had prolonged contact with another other than her Mother before.

Which, speaking of: there is a sex scene in the tower towards the end of the book, to match up with the one in the Grimms' tale, and it was one of the most awkward and uncomfortable and also disturbing scenes I have read in a YA book. It isn't explicit, but at this point, Zel is only 14 years old and has been in a tower since she was 12 - and she only met the prince once before, shortly before her 12th birthday. The prince, who shares a birthday with her, is 15 or 16 years old. I suppose the young ages can be explained by it being mid-16th century, and also young people do have sex after all, but it still felt very wrong to me. Even when I was 16 or 17 myself, I didn't like that part of the book.

On the whole, I was dissatisfied with Zel because it wants to explore the darker nature of the witch, but otherwise gives short shrift to the rest of the story, and has a few elements that just didn't work at all for me. I think that for a retelling of a story, I want more depth to all the characters, not just the one, or else more attention paid to how the setting affects the tale. There wasn't really a resolution to the conflict with Mother and her devil bargain, which also left me frustrated after so much lead-in. I did like the way the narrative takes turns with different points of view for each of the three main characters, and the descriptions of the natural places, and food, and tower, and so on.

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I picked this up because it was on the "recommended" list at the back of one of Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow's anthologies - and I'm very glad I did!
It's a retelling of the story of Rapunzel, set in the 1500's in Switzerland. While Napoli does not take out the more fantastic/magical elements of

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the story, she very much emphasizes the psychological elements of the story: the witch who demands a baby girl in return for the theft of her lettuce is not simply evil, but clings to her "adopted" daughter, Rapunzel, with a fierce and possessive "love," which over the years grows more and more obsessively twisted, till it leads to her imprisoning her in an isolated tower, with terrible consequences for Zel's sanity... The dynamic, as it is portrayed, is far too close to the reality of how many parents cling to their children (finding it hard to let them grow up, become independent, and find love on their own) to be comfortable reading. Although the book was marketed toward young teens, I found it to be one of the most disturbing (but also most romantic!) works I've read in quite a while.
Highly recommended for fans of Patricia McKillip.

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Wow. As other reviewers have said, it is dark, intense, mature, horrifying, sophisticated. Very true to the un-sanitized, un-disneyfied style of the older European folk-tales. Its ubiety is key to understanding Napoli's intent - it couldn't be written with a first-world 21st century setting.

I do

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disagree with the reviewers who imply it's a quick read. Napoli worked hard on the language, on the structure, on the three unique perspectives of Girl, Count, and Mother, on the change in their Voices as the drama progresses. Slow down and savor it.

Also slow down so you can notice all the wonderful supporting details. For example, the young man is not a prince, and does not have the people's permission to debauch & plunder. He is being trained to work hard, for example to monitor the quality of imported goods. And pay attention to the poor widowed goose we meet early on. Watch how the different foods they eat are described.

And if you are reading it as a teen, read it again when you're a parent.

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Great retelling of the Rapunzel story.

A refreshing new take on Rapunzel. the story of a young girl coming of age and realizing she needs more in her life than just her mother. I read this book in less than a day, it was that good.

A 4 star story until the last chapter, which read like a strange, surreal epilogue. It felt somewhat out of place, too mysterious and impossible even for this mysterious and magical tale.