Revised Fairy Tale

Zel turns her hands palms down, runs her fingers across the floor. She finds the sharp stone. It took her twelve days to work that stone from the wall. Her fingernails broke. Her fingertips went raw. She opens her eyes and pushes the mattress aside. She scratches a line on the floor beside the other lines, each one marking a day. Zel pulls the mattress back in place. No one who enters the room sees the scratches. Zel laughs. No one enters the room.

Donna Jo Napoli's Zel is a re-telling of the Rapunzel fable from three points of view: Mother, Zel and Konrad (Zel's prince, who is a Count in this version). Napoli weaves in threads of weightier topics such as religion and social class divides but the book is primarily a love story. Make that a love triangle. It is the story of Zel's two soul mates, her Mother and her lover, and the dangers that arise when someone wants something so passionately they are willing to give anything to obain it.

But it is also a book about madness. I was reminded over and over again of Charlotte Perkin Gilman's short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, because of the way Zel endlessly circles the space where she is held captive and scrawls upon the walls. Only Zel is not the only mad woman in the story. Mother, a character given no other name because she is so overwhelmingly consumed with this one function in life, plumbs incredible depths in order to realize her deepest desires.

Zel begins slowly and the stilted, somewhat Victorian-type language took some getting used to, so readers will have to decide whether reaching the book's finale is worth the effort. I felt it was because the agony of the characters was very intimately portrayed and reminded me of another favourite book, Wuthering Heights. This kind of work will not appeal to everyone; it's the sort of book that you will want to explore only if you are interested in taking a closer look at the depths of human depravity but also the power of human forgiveness. Recommended for teens who are reading at a mature level.

The details: Napoli, Donna Jo. Zel. Toronto: Puffin, 1996.