LETTERS FROM RAPUNZEL
by Sara Holmes
HarperCollins
ISBN-10: 0060780738
ISBN-13: 9780060780739
Ages 8-12
192 pages

A girl calling herself "Rapunzel" writes letters to a post office box after she finds a scrap of a letter written from her father to the box number. It says that the unknown recipient is the key to his succeeding as a poet and as a human. Now Rapunzel's dad has been hospitalized for severe depression, and Rapunzel begins pouring her heart out in the letters, although she never receives a reply.

Rapunzel feels as trapped as her namesake --- only instead of being in a castle she is stuck in the dreary Homework Club in her school cafeteria. Her busy mother insists that Rapunzel attend this after-school program.

Rapunzel is new at her school and doesn't have friends her age. According to her IQ test results (which she hides from her mother), she's a genius. But she doesn't care enough about school to actually study and has no desire to enter the gifted and talented program her teachers believe is right for her. Meanwhile, she pleads for help from P.O. Box #5667.

A curious Rapunzel goes to the post office to check out the box and finds it crammed full of mail. No wonder she's not getting any responses! She questions the clerk, who refuses to tell her who rents it.

Rapunzel comes up with her own plan to break her father's Evil Spell. She will buy the bridge that is the subject of his book of poetry, since the bridge is for sale. Owning it surely would snap her dad out of his depression. If only she had, uh, three-quarters of a million dollars.

Rapunzel's maneuverings fall through, and she is forced to attend the gifted program. The first day does not go well, to say the least. When a boy finds a poem she wrote about her father and mocks it, she decks him with an English textbook and finds herself in an all-day detention. But things go way downhill from there when poor Rapunzel learns something shocking about the bridge for sale.

LETTERS FROM RAPUNZEL won the Ursula Nordstrom First Fiction Contest, and it's easy to see why. Gutsy Rapunzel has a delightfully forthright voice. Several mysteries thread through the plot, which eventually are solved in a satisfying manner. The book is humorous but also heartbreaking, filled with yearning and poignancy. Rapunzel's fresh story is one that will linger in the minds of readers for a very long time.

   --- Reviewed by Terry Miller Shannon (terryms2001@yahoo.com)

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