Stars: ★★.5/5
Rapunzel is not your average teenager.
For one thing, she has a serious illness that keeps her inside the mysterious Gothel Mansion. And for another, her hair is 15 feet long. Not to mention that she’s also the key to ultimately saving the world from certain destruction. But then she meets a boy named Fane, who changes all she has ever known, and she decides to risk everything familiar to find out who she really is.
I didn’t dsilike Rapunzel Untangled in the end as much as I thought I would have. I have no extreme feelings for this book one way or another, but I did have several issues with the book that really ruined my reading experience.
In April of 2008, Elizabeth Fritzl was rescued after spending twenty four years locked in her father's cellar. There she had been repeatedly raped and, over time, given birth to seven of of her father's children. Three of these children were kept with Elizabeth in the dimly-lit cellar for their entire lives. In the aftermath, the three Fritzl children’s health remained uncertain: “…health experts say a chronic lack of sunlight and exercise can leave children's bones pliable, their muscles weak and their eyes overly sensitive to strong light. The Fritzls' vulnerabilities hardly stop there. The immune system, like the brain, requires stimulation to develop.”
So, Rapunzel's relative health really perplexes me. Like the Fritzls, Rapunzel has never been in direct contact with the outside world. Her only access to it came from a single window in her bedroom and her brief interactions with Gothel. She has some exposure to sunlight through this window, though only in the morning when it is “early enough that the workers hadn’t show up,” which is a few moments before six o’clock in the morning. Yet when she makes her first foray into the outside world, she is completely unfazed by the sunlight. Even the Chilean miners that had been trapped underground for sixty-nine days had to readjust to sunlight so they didn't permanently damage their eyes. But Rapunzel just gets to traipse outside without consequence?
She hadn’t even touched a live plant before, but rolls around in the grass without any reaction. She touches birds and eats McDonald’s and touches Fane with really no physical consequences at all. It's insisted Rapunzel’s health is in jeopardy as she does these things, but because nothing really happens, the stakes never really feel that high. It isn’t until after Rapunzel attends a Halloween party that there are any repercussions to her health, but it came so late in the game that it didn't really make much sense. I think this was Bennett's attempt at acknowledging the physical consequences of Rapunzel leaving her home, but because she recovers and eventually does go outside again to no further problem, I really couldn't buy into this. Throughout the rest of Rapunzel Untangled, we’re led to believe that Rapunzel’s immune system is reasonably intact.
My biggest issues with Rapunzel Untangled overall have to do with its implausibility. Not only because of Rapunzel’s physical and mental well-being after a life of total isolation, but because of so many other little things that continued to add up. In one scene Rapunzel uses Google to answer literally all of the questions she’s had her entire life, and I almost marked this as a DNF. Google is literally used as a device to move the story along. I could not believe the level of laziness.
Despite my many problems with the book overall, I found Rapunzel and her love interest, Fane, to be one of the more enjoyable aspects of the book. They weren’t particularly memorable, but their interactions and relationship were sweet. They were likeable. Their Thanksgiving together, and Rapunzel’s first experience with a real family, were very nice, very tender moments. They were one of the reasons Rapunzel Untangled was an okay experience for me.
Like I said, I didn’t terribly dislike Rapunzel Untangled. I don’t want to discourage anyone from reading it, because I’m sure it will be enjoyed by people who can get over what I couldn’t.
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