Rapunzel

ZELINSKY, Paul O. Rapunzel. NY: Dutton Childrens Books [1997]. 4to, [40]pp. Color pictorial boards. Color pictorial endpapers; color illustrations thoughout. A fine copy in original color pictorial dust jacket (no medal affixed). Signed by the author/artist, Caldecott Medalist Paul O. Zelinsky!

First edition. 1998 Caldecott Medal Winner! Zelinsky’s retelling ofRapunzelreaches back beyond the Grimms to a late-seventeenth-century French tale by Mlle. la Force, who based hers on the Neapolitan talePetrosinellain a collection popular at the time. The artist understands the story’s fundamentals to be about possessiveness, confinement, and separation, rather than about punishment and deprivation. Thus the tower the sorceress gives Rapunzel here is not a desolate, barren structure of denial but one of esoteric beauty on the outside and physical luxury within. And the world the artist creates through the elements in his paintings the palette, control of light, landscape, characters, architecture, interiors, costumes speaks to us not of an ugly witch who cruelly imprisons a beautiful young girl, but of a mother figure who powerfully resists her child’s inevitable growth, and of a young woman and man who must struggle in the wilderness for the self-reliance that is the true beginning of their adulthood.