This story is slightly odd in that it takes a heroine who (like most fairy tale heroines) doesn’t have that much to her to begin with, and makes her into two whole people instead of one. Yet it is exactly those unknowns that make fairy tales so eminantly retellable, that leave them so full of space for new themes and details. There are so many open spaces and unknowns in a fairy tale that filling them in can be both daunting and exciting. I chose the quote above because it seems like the perfect quote for anyone attempting to retell a fairy tale in a novel. Rapunzel is perhaps my favorite fairy tale and I have generally been disappointed in retellings of it, but this one manages to both respect the story and put it’s own special twist on it. It really is a beautiful and incredibly unusual retelling of Rapunzel, and I love it for that. This week I finished Golden by Cameron Dokey. For we have the opportunity to fill the empty, unknown spaces for ourselves, and in them there is room for imagination and for hope. As long as a thing is unknown, it belongs to us in a way that well-known things do not.
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