Zel

[nannah]

(oops, I should have taken advantage of the "reread" feature--that is a feature now, right?)

I remember reading this back in high school/middle school and absolutely adoring it. What I remembered about it was a beautiful love story, lots of enchantment, and a well-told story. Obviously, my memory is/was a little misleading, haha!

Book content warnings:
child abuse

Zel is a much, much darker tale than I remembered. It's a story of manipulative, abusive, and obsessive love and a girl who was once happy and innocent becoming bruised by it. Rapunzel is a lovely girl living with Mother in a reclusive alm, almost smothered by her love, but still happy in it, until her mother begins to fear she could be taken away by a youth who catches her eye when they visit the market. Frenzied with this fear, her mother hides her away in that famous tower until she's sure Rapunzel will choose to live with her forever. Unfortunately, it backfires.

Mother and Rapunzel are wonderfully crafted characters in such a short novel. They have such exposed flaws and feel very raw, which is nice to see in a young adult novel. Every character has flaws, and every character grows past them.

But still, some things made me uncomfortable reading the book. Count Konrad (our male love interest here) becomes obsessive in his search for Rapunzel after meeting her by chance just once at the market, and begins to eat the lettuce she's named after every single day. He searches for her day after day, and instead of being endearing like when I was younger, it makes me uncomfortable.

But even for that, it's still a very well-told book, and it does exactly what it sets out to do.