Letters from Rapunzel (Hardcover)

by Sara Lewis Holmes (Author)
Key Phrases: primrose pollen, Evil Spell, Homework Club, Happy Ending (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal
Grade 5–8—"In the real world, you can only understand your life backwards," writes Cadence Brogan to #5667, the unknown post-office-box holder with whom she begins a one-sided correspondence. After finding the number on a mysterious torn piece of a letter written in her father's hand, she feels somehow that this is the key to unlocking the secrets surrounding her. Cadence sees her life as a modern-day fairy tale in which she is Rapunzel, alone, abandoned, and waiting for answers. Her father's clinical depression she terms the Evil Spell; the teacher at the after-school Homework Center is dubbed the Wicked Witch. Through a series of journal-like writings to the elusive #5667, she comes to terms with her life and begins to understand her father's illness. Although the plot loses momentum at times, Holmes carries the story to a satisfying ending through realistic, insightful dialogue and her ability to develop a bright, capable character in Cadence. Reluctant readers will be drawn to the short chapters. The novel could be therapeutic for those children who must deal with the far-reaching effects of a parent's illness while experiencing the universal angst of adolescence. Cadence leaves readers with the wisdom that one must rescue oneself before rescuing others.—D. Maria LaRocco, Cuyahoga Public Library, Strongsville, OH
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"A moving debut novel with many poignant passages. Will keep thoughtful readers involved." -- Publishers Weekly

"Delicately layered grace and springiness. An original story." -- Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

"Letters from Rapunzel proves that [Sara Holmes] is a hot rookie prospect" -- Morning Star Wilmington (NC)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 9-12
  
• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins; Ages 8-12 OR Grades 4-8 edition (February 20, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060780738
• ISBN-13: 978-0060780739
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #870,077 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #29 in

  Books > Children's Books > Popular Characters > Fairy Tales & Folk Tales > Rapunzel

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A First-Time Novelist Makes her Mark . . . , July 15, 2007

By	Julie Danielson "julesterp" (Nashville, TN) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is Sara Lewis Holmes' debut novel, winner of the first annual Ursula Nordstrom Fiction Contest. An epistolary novel (that quickly becomes tantamount to reading a young girl's diary), it centers around twelve-year-old Cadence who calls herself Rapunzel. Cadence is extremely close to her father, a poet, who is suddenly hospital-bound with clinical depression. Soon after his hospitalization, Cadence finds an intimate and cryptic (but incomplete) letter he had written to someone nameless, addressed to a post office box. In the hopes that the recipient of the letters will help her save her father, she composes letters and sends them to this particular post office box, #5667. However, she finds herself writing so much more -- re-writings of fairy tales with her own plucky spin (one of her protagonist princesses decides not to marry the prince after all and not to sleep on any more piles of mattresses: She will no longer "take teeny-tiny steps. Instead, I opened my own detective agency, and lived happily ever after, asking lots and lots of questions. THE END"); creative responses to homework assignments and math problems; and letters to the editor when she hears about the imminent destruction of one of the last authentic swing bridges in her area, a place holding special significance for her father and a place, she learns the hard way, that was the backdrop for a devastating turning point in her father's illness. All the while, no one, including her mother, is talking to her honestly about his depression. She imagines herself a modern fairy tale heroine, mostly "just a victim in a tower," she writes to the nameless letter recipient: Her particular prison tower being the afterschool Homework Club, and the evil spell that has afflicted her father, his depression.

The book has a steady, vigorous pace; Holmes' Cadence is fully-realized (she's entrancing when she really gets going) and will especially draw young pre-teen girls who feel a bit left of center or a bit out of place, especially if its due to their brain power in and out of the classroom ("Everyone thinks that smart people are happy, but it's not true. What's so happy about being able to see what's wrong all the time, and not having the power to fix it? What's so happy about feeling weird and different every day of your life?" she writes in one letter); as The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books put it well, the novel possesses a "{d}elicately layered grace and springiness"; and there's a lot of poignancy in the novel, yet Holmes knows how to put on the brakes and keep it from getting too schmaltzy or overdone. Her relationship with her father is especially moving; here she is writing to the nameless post office box recipient (though it quickly becomes clear, especially after getting no letters in response, that she's writing for her own self-preservation):

"Did you know he writes me a letter, with a poem in it, every year, for my birthday? Half the time I don't understand the poem - not completely anyway - but it doesn't matter. Understanding isn't the point. It's how those poems make me feel. I read them to myself at night, sitting cross-legged on the bed, catching the words on the paper like they were fantastical beasts in the round, pale moonbeam of his silver flashlight. In the daylight, the words seem to run away when I try to read them, but at night, safely circled by my mighty beam, they slow down and turn toward me, and I whisper them to myself, memorizing their tracks on the page.

That's what I love about my dad - he doesn't give me cute or fancy verses for my birthday. He gives me strange and beautiful and mysterious pools of words, way over my head, but right at eye level with my heart. Those poems make me feel I'm truly growing older, that it isn't just a cake-and-icing-induced hallucination."

And there are also several beautifully-rendered moments as Cadence works through her confusion and her sadness over her father's sudden absence, all through her letter-writing. In thinking about her father's love of poetry ("One time he said poetry happened whenever he felt `the weight of reality's shadow.' I didn't get that exactly, but then he said it was like the world tilted, or shifted a little, so that he could see its hidden side"), she comes to understand her own writing abilities, albeit accidentally: "Then something weird happened. I wrote a poem about it. I didn't mean to, but all of a sudden, it was like there was another SOMETHING in the room, like a ghost. You know how you feel like there's breath on your neck? I didn't know how long it would last, so I grabbed a pen and I wrote down everything I could about that moment. What I wrote didn't make sense at first, but then I remembered what my dad told me once about his work - that he tried to make his poems like spells (good ones, not evil) so that when someone heard one, the listener would be haunted by the spirit of the poem, as he was when he wrote it . . ." Ah, loveliness.

Best of all, though, is Holmes' perceptive commentary on modern education (or, at the very least, the tendency of some teachers to adhere a bit too rigidly to pedagogical orthodoxy). Cadence is brilliant and very determined to avoid trying the new gifted program that her mother and some teachers want her to join. Compounding her dislike for school, a handful of her teachers refuse her rather imaginative ("frivolous" in the eyes of some teachers) efforts at answering homework questions. "Why do teachers encourage you to be creative when they don't mean it?" she writes. Indeed, her letters to the editor about the imminent destruction of the bridge are smart and incisive.

And, in the end, thoughtful readers will appreciate Holmes' further commentary on some readers' insistence for happy endings in stories and Cadence's acceptance that "{y}ou must be willing to have your heart broken in order to live. There's no other choice, scramble as we may to look for it, to find a way out of our dilemma. It is hope, crack your heart open and breathe, or close it up and die." That's not to say that something dreadfully tragic happens either; this is not the case at all. It's simply that Cadence -- and her father, for that matter -- comes to realize that she must make herself vulnerable, despite the pain, that the light can come through, even when things seem topsy-turvy and beyond repair.

In the words of Cadence, "It's very hard, rescuing yourself."

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Rapunzel, Rapunzel, not a letdown ah-here, April 20, 2007

By	E. R. Bird "Ramseelbird" (Manhattan, NY) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Gail Carson Levine has a lot to answer for.

When Our Lady of Ella Enchanted proved that biggie awards could go to fairy tale-inspired fantasies, this knowledge launched an unprecedented variety of fairy tale freakouts . As we speak we are still in the midst of a kind of folktale maelstrom, so you'll forgive me if my initial sideways glance at "Letters from Rapunzel," appeared to produce just more of the same. The winner of the 2004 Ursula Nordstrom Fiction Contest (run by Harper Collins for those first-time never-before-published types), Ms. Sara Lewis Holmes won it fair and square and this here book is the result. Despite its cover and title, the book is not, in fact, one of the fairytale ilk. Using the Rapunzel motif, Holmes paints a picture of a family whose patriarch is suffering from chronic depression. Balancing out its painful subject matter with its heroine's wit, whimsy, and disconnect from reality, "Letters from Rapunzel" manages a delicate balancing act that comes to a happy end for both character and reader.

She's been sending letters to an unknown post office box ever since her father disappeared from her life. For Rapunzel (the name she chooses to give herself) life was fine until her dad went through a new bout of crippling depression and had to be taken away to recover. What does that mean for our heroine? It means trying to put up with teachers and principals who think that just because you aced some test they gave out, you're a genius. A genius, mind you, who'd rather write letters to a stranger than end up in some lousy class for smart kids where Andrew, the boy she hates, is waiting to torment her. As for the letters, Rapunzel started writing them when she found a letter from her father written to an unknown address. Hoping against hope that maybe she'll be able to contact someone who can help her dad shrug off his "evil spell", Rapunzel does everything she can to contact her mysterious someone. Yet when she meets only silence and an increase in her own problems, it takes some detective work and self-possession to get to the bottom of what exactly happened to Rapunzel's father.

To whip together both fairytale and realistic elements like this is a risk. It would be all too easy for the book of this sort to make a sideways stumble towards the land of twee. Cute references to the story of Rapunzel in the midst of a family drama? The danger that it could become too sweet is immense. I'm still not entirely certain that it was wise to equate Rapunzel's father's depression with the moniker "an evil spell", but at least the author makes it clear that when it comes to equating reality with fantasy, our heroine isn't the most reliable of narrators. The story is also an interesting take on the usually staid and solid "problem books".

A librarian making a list of books dealing with mental illnesses might just slip this title under the "Depression" category without a second thought. I do think that it's lighter and, I dare say, more interesting than a lot of books on this topic for kids out there. That is not a criticism. If every book written on depression rendered the reader (forgive me) depressed, a fair share of kids would be disinclined to delve in that area. Holmes has had the sense then to imbue her book with some fun. I initially resisted it, but I ended up liking the heroine. When handed a charming science assignment that requires her to find ten different ways to rescue the character of Rapunzel from her tower using simple machines, our heroine is inventive enough to say, "but hey, the assignment didn't say we had to keep her alive, did it?" Hence method number one, "Use a giant lever to pry her out. Be prepared for the funeral." Holmes doesn't overdo the humor, letting it float the top of a page here and there without breaking up the action or appearing where it might be inappropriate. For example, the ritual that comes with birthdays, wherein the birthdayee feels older, is described as, "just a cake-and-icing-induced hallucination."

The letter element is, of course, the hook. It's a booktalking point. The idea of mysterious letters sent into the vast unknown is a bit old-fashioned in this high tech day and age. That might account for books like this and The Mailbox by Audrey Shafer that play on the mystery and allure of sending mail to unknown personages. The book also splits apart continually into little asides that serve to break up the text. I'm beginning to suspect that this is some kind of new trend in children's book publishing since I'm seeing it in a lot of other books as well. Kirsten's Miller's Kiki Strike did it. The Thing About Georgie by Lisa Graff has lots of them. And in this particular book you're likely to trip over one of Rapunzel's "Fairy-Tale Fortunes" or school assignment every three pages or so. Does it hurt the book in the end? Not necessarily. It's just hard to get into a story or take it seriously when you're constantly being jerked out of the central tale as frequently as is found here. It makes for more enjoyable reading, perhaps, but does it make for a worthwhile read?

You will be happy to hear that "Letters from Rapunzel", doesn't have any easy answers. No miracles or unlikely coincidences spring up. It is not, I should add, a book that Holmes should stop with. While well told, the book feels like a novel found in an author's early career. And as it's not the only Rapunzel-like story out this year, feel free to also check out Into the Wild by Sarah Beth Durst and Into the Woods by Lyn Gardner for your standard retellings of classic folktales (and their skewed results). This may even make a good crossover title for those kids who only like fantasy and need some kind of fantastical hook to lure them into the scary realm of realistic fiction. Fun and smart enough for your consideration.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Courtesy of Teens Read Too, April 5, 2007

By	TeensReadToo.com "Eat. Drink. Read. Be Merrier." (All Over the US & Canada) - See all my reviews

Cadence Brogan aka Rapunzel may have found someone to help her with her problems. That someone is P.O. Box # 5667.

Cadence's father has battled clinical depression most of his life. His recent bout has required treatment in the hospital to regulate his medication. Shortly after her father's hospitalization, Cadence discovers a torn piece from a letter her father had written to someone with the address P.O. Box #5667. Not knowing this person, but hoping whoever it is can help shed more light on her father's condition; Cadence begins writing her own letters.

The problems Cadence hopes to get help with include her father's rapid recovery and return home, a busy, hard-working mother, an annoying classmate named Andrew, and mandatory attendance in the GT (Gifted and Talented) program.

A great lover of fairy tales, Cadence focuses on the similarities between herself and the imprisoned Rapunzel. Many of her letters describe her hope to escape and her search to find a cure for the Evil Spell holding her father "prisoner." As she searches for answers, some of what she discovers is not pleasant. In an effort to protect her, Cadence learns that her mother, who refers to her husband's condition as C.D., has not been completely honest about the extent of the depression. Not being able to share her thoughts with her father, more and more of Cadence's feelings pour out in her letters to #5667.

Sara Lewis Holmes cleverly creates Cadence's story through these letters. She has Cadence holding out hope that her letters will be answered, but even as that hope fades, Holmes portrays a positive, up-beat Cadence. Any reader will identify with the struggle to overcome adversity, but this book is sure to hit home with readers who have experience with friends or family members suffering from clinical depression.

Reviewed by: Sally Kruger, aka "Readingjunky"