ZEL
review by Peta Andersen
Donna Jo Napoli
Dutton Juvenile
h Mother, the goose is on her nest again." Zel rests her weight on the windowsill and leans out. Her feet dance on tiptoe. The goose stretches her neck forward and smacks the bottom of her bill on the rocky soil. "Goose!" Zel shouts. "Dear goose. You're terribly confused." Zel hears a thunk. She spins around.
So begins Donna Jo Napoli's Zel, a retelling of the well-known fairy tale Rapunzel. Told entirely in present tense, the text is a blend of simple sentences and near-Spartan telling, with Napoli relying on the reader's own sense of the fairy tale for background. Each character in the story—the witch, Rapunzel, and the prince—is given a chance to speak for his or herself, and the story is richer for it. We begin with Zel, unsurprisingly named, "a gentle girl with a winning way", then move to Mother, the witch, and Konrad, the son of a count, in place of the fairy tale's prince. Zel and Konrad each have their moments, but no character is quite so interesting as Zel's Mother, the witch.
Although Napoli doesn't reveal Zel's mother to be a witch, the witch, until about halfway through the novel, it is clear almost immediately. The hints at Mother's psychological state—I blanch. Zel will not be wed within the year. No. She must not leave me.—are clear, her words not the words of a sane mother. Napoli's use of first person for Mother helps gives immediacy and intimacy where the reader does not expect even though I know how the story will turn out, must turn out, Mother is the most sympathetic of all the characters. .
Napoli has been criticised for her inclusion of sex in this novel. Some critics consider the work inappropriate for children, some consider it an insult or unwarranted addition to the original fairy tale, and some see it as tasteful and necessary. I'm somewhere in between—anyone who's read an unsanitised version of Rapunzel knows that it contains sex, and Napoli is neither bawdy nor lewd in her telling. As Konrad's obsession with Rapunzel grows; as he grows more desperate, his searches become broader and more frenzied, and his appetite focused solely on rapunzel, or rampion, a slightly bitter lettuce eaten both raw and cooked. Here, Napoli returns to the skillful implications she is well-known for; eating is an oft-used literary and fairy tale device suggesting sex, lust, and desire, and Napoli uses it to advantage, providing insight to the older reader while remaining unspecific enough for the younger.
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