Letters from Rapunzel
Sara Lewis Holmes
2007 (HarperCollins)

“Rapunzel” writes letters to a Post Office box that her father used to write to. In these letters she writes about what she’s worried about, what she hopes for and what she’s trying to accomplish. Her father, who has always been under and Evil Spell (Clinical Depression), is in the hospital and no one will tell her what’s going on beyond that. Her mother is woefully unwilling to share information with our heroine. As if this wasn’t enough to deal with, “Rapunzel” is being put into the gifted program at school (which she clearly belongs in) and she isn’t very happy about it. Through her letters we get to see how she reacts to all of this and get a taste of this wonderful character’s amazing imagination.

I adored this book. It was really amazing to me. I always find books where a character is portrayed as “gifted and talented” interesting because I was such a kid myself and knew many more such kids (I went to a special school full of them). The problem with such characters is that they often aren’t very believable. Either being smart is portrayed as an amazing gift and the kid can do anything they want once they realize it or they are snotty little brats that you’d never want to be friends with (think Hermione Granger in the first book before the boys get to know her, but usually worse). The truth is, it’s not really like that. Being gifted is awesome in some very real ways, but it also majorly sucks in some very real ways. Holmes really, truly got it. She absolutely nailed it. I’ve never read a book before that spoke so realistically to what it’s like to be a gifted kid dealing with schools and the stupidness that comes along with them. Cadence (”Rapunzel”) speaks with such a genuine voice and her stories and responses to school assignments (classic gifted kid responses to homework, by the way) rin...

I’m not afraid of books written for kids that dig into intense issues. I know that such books can be powerful tools to get kids thinking about difficult things in the world and in their own lives. I’ve seen kids who are normally closed and reticent open up and express really insightful ideas when they read  books about more challenging topics.

So, you’re wondering what all this has to do with the pretty book about Rapunzel up top? Sara Lewis Holmes’s book, Letters from Rapunzel is not a fluffy piece of chick lit. Quite the contrary. Holmes uses the Rapunzel fairy tale as a creative device to explore a challenging topic in her first novel for Middle Grade Readers. And people have been taking notice from the get go. Holmes’s story won the Harper Collins Ursula Nordstrom First Fiction Contest, and it is up for a Cybils Award this year in the Middle Grade Fiction category. 

Letters from Rapunzel is a story written entirely in… you guessed it… letters. The narrator, who calls herself Rapunzel, is having a bit of a rough go of it, as her father has been cursed with what she calls “The Evil Spell,” and he is away in hospital trying to get better. Rapunzel is fighting her own battles at school as well, since she can’t ever seem to do exactly what her teachers want her to do. She follows her own wacky and creative path at all times, and her mom and teachers are encouraging her to give the Gifted and Talented program a shot. While her father is in hospital and her mother is working extra hours, Rapunzel is trapped in her tower (aka after school Homework Club), and she’s pretty desperate to get out. When she finds a cryptic piece of a letter her father wrote before he got sick, addressed to P.O. Box #5667, she decides that finding out the secret of Box #5667 might lead her to save her father from his curse, and so she begins to write letters to this mystery person.

The more yo...

Here’s the continuing middle-grade novel round-up, the first book here being for the younger set and the other being for your slightly older middle-grader (I’ve mentioned before that I hate the category game, but I feel like I need to point that out).

And both titles feature some unforgettable heroines, so let’s get right to it then. Without further ado, meet Moxy. Meet Cadence . . .

Moxy Maxwell Does Not Love Stuart Little
by Peggy Gifford with photographs by Valorie Fisher
Schwartz & Wade Books
On the shelves: May 8, 2007
(review copy)

Nine-year-old Moxy Maxwell may not have actually started her required summer reading — Stuart Little, of course — but she’s at least had it on her person practically all summer. It’s “spent a considerable amount of the summer soaking up sun and water,” as she has carried it with her everywhere: in her backpack, on her lap, and in the car on the way to rehearse her water-ballet daisy petal routine, where it then promptly fell into the pool. “It was also true that Moxy’s mother had found Stuart Little on the porch under the broken leg of the wicker coffee table more than once.” When the book opens, it’s late August — specifically, it’s the day before school begins — and Moxy’s mother warns her: If she does not stay in her room and read all of the book, “there were going to be ‘consequences.’”

This is Peggy Gifford’s first children’s book. Told with much tongue-in-cheek drama and hyperbole (it opens with . . . “because I am the first to write {this story} down, you will have to accept my version of the astonishing and tragic events that befell Moxy Maxwell last August 23″), she’s nailed the dread that some students face with the ‘ol required summer reading assignment...

Grimm's Fairy Tales meet The Breakfast Club in Letters from Rapunzel, the debut young-adult novel from former Tar Heel Sara Lewis Holmes.

The narrator - slipping up on her 13th birthday - calls herself Rapunzel. She has another name (a very pretty one, but you have to read awhile to find it), but the pseudonym fits because, like the fairy tale heroine, she's trapped - not in a tower but in an after-school torture chamber called "Homework Club."

Rapunzel's dad, a poetry professor, has fallen under an Evil Spell. Actually, he's in a hospital, with what her mom calls "CD." That's short for "clinical depression." (Mom habitually abbreviates everything.)

Since Dad's not home, and since Mom, a nurse, is tied up with late shifts at the hospital, Rapunzel's stuck at school, in a sort of super-study hall presided over by an Evil Witch.

Rapunzel's bright but bored. She's been dodging the gifted-and-talented program she thinks is just for nerds or stuck-up jerks like her worst enemy, Andrew.

So, instead of working the story problems for math or listing the Six Basic Machines with three examples of each, she's been writing letters to a mysterious pen pal at Box 5667, an address she found on a balled-up note in her dad's wastebasket. (Who's on the other end of that box is one of the book's big surprises.)

In letter after letter - and why doesn't No. 5667 ever answer? - Rapunzel recounts her skirmishes at school and home. (Fortunately, since Mom's working overtime and is pretty distracted, it's easy for her to intercept all the notes from school.) She hunts for a way to break...

Little Willow (slayground) wrote,
@ 2008-03-05 21:04:00