Rapunzel

By: Paul Zelinsky (1997)

This story is about a girl is held as a prisoner in a tower because she is given to a mean sorceress after the girl's parents are found to have been trespassing on the sorceresses property. With the help of the girl's long hair, the sorceress is able to climb up into the tower to check on the girl whenever she wants. A prince then finds her in the tower and climbs up her hair. Rapunzel then becomes pregnant, and seeing this, the sorceress becomes angry and cuts her hair and throws her out into the wild. The sorceress tricks the prince into climbing up the tower and when he gets to the top she pushes him out and he falls and becomes blind as a result of the impact. While wandering blindly through the forest, the prince finds Rapunzel and their two children. Rapunzel heals the prince with her tears and they live happily ever after.

While I have heard bits and pieces of the Rapunzel story, I have never read the whole thing and it was interesting to do so because there were some things that I learned that I did not previously know before about the story. I thought that the illustrations were really well done, and overall, it was a good story, although there really wasn't much of a message.

I think that this could be a story that would be popular with both lower and upper elementary students. The early elementary students would enjoy the popular fairy tale story that they may have heard parts of before, and this story could be read as part of a fairy tale unit. I think that upper elementary students could read this story as part of a unit that compared different versions of the same fairy tale. Many popular fairy tales have been redone many times, and this story could be one of the versions that they read. Students could then compare and contrast the different versions and see if there are any trends between the time periods and authors that recreate popular stories.