Rapunzel
by Paul O. Zelinsky
Summary
Paul O. Zelinsky retells the Brothers Grimm version of the old tale: a couple trades their unborn daughter to a sorceress in exchange for stolen rampion from her garden, and the sorceress raises the girl, Rapunzel, locking her away at twelve in a tower with no door, climbing to reach her by pulling herself up Rapunzel's own impossibly long braided hair. A prince discovers the tower and courts Rapunzel in secret, and when the sorceress finds out, she cuts off Rapunzel's hair, banishes her to a wilderness, and uses the severed braid to lure the prince up the tower herself, where thorns blind him when he leaps down in despair. Years later the blinded prince wanders until he hears Rapunzel's voice, and her tears, falling on his eyes as they embrace, restore his sight, reuniting the family in the open world outside the tower's walls at last.
Zelinsky paints with the composition and light of the Italian Renaissance art that has fascinated him since his student years in Rome, drapery, architecture, and landscape rendered with a museum painting's weight rather than a fairy tale's usual flatter, more decorative style; he has said he wants his pictures to speak in the same voice as the words, and the result reads less like an illustrated story and more like a sequence of old master paintings that happen to tell one.
The formal, painterly pacing suits a slightly older audience, six and up, patient enough for long, unhurried spreads, and the story's darker turns, the sorceress's cruelty, the prince's blinding, make it fuller and stranger than the softened modern retellings many children already know.
Historical Context & Significance
Rapunzel won the 1998 Caldecott Medal. The three Honor Books that year were David Small's The Gardener, written by Sarah Stewart, Christopher Myers's Harlem, written by Walter Dean Myers, and Simms Taback's There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.
This was Zelinsky's fourth Caldecott recognition and first medal, following three earlier Honor citations, for Hansel and Gretel in 1985, Rumpelstiltskin in 1987, and Swamp Angel, written by Anne Isaacs, in 1995. The Detroit Free Press credited him with integrating picture and text so closely that the two could not be judged apart, arguing that what raised him into the front rank of illustrators was never the pictures alone. Coming after three Honor citations without a medal, Rapunzel read at the time as a kind of overdue recognition, a fourth picture book from Zelinsky finally taking the award his previous three, two of them fairy tale retellings much like this one, had each come one step short of winning.