Rapunzella, Or, Don't Touch My Hair
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Rapunzella is a genre-bending novel that weaves together a young girl's ordinary life and a wildly dangerous fairytale universe, celebrating Black hair and the power of coming into your identity.
"Recasting classic fairy tales in the context of Blackness, the marvelous novel Rapunzella, Or, Don't Touch My Hair celebrates Black women's solidarity and the magic that's innate in Black girls. . . . A love letter to Black women." Foreword, STARRED REVIEW
Zella is imprisoned in an enchanted forest made of her own Afro, and the might of the evil King Charming seems unstoppable. But is it? Can she use her power to change the future?
You're fifteen. You spend your time at school and at Val's hair salon with Baker, Val's son, who has eyes that are like falling off a cliff into space. The salon is a space of safety, but also of possibility and dreams. When you dream, you visit an enchanted forest full of friends and wonder. You dream of witches and magic, of hair so rich and alive that it grow upwards and outwards into a wild landscape, becomes trees and leaves, and houses birds and butterflies and all the secret creatures that belong in such a forest. But when you wake, your memories vanish, and you are just you, trying to navigate relationships and learning who you will grow up to be.
Is there a future where your dreams are more than just dreams?
Ella McLeod's debut merges poetry and prose in a stunningly lyrical, heart-piercingly honest exploration of a teenager coming into her power as a young woman.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Verse and prose in alternating second- and third-person POVs coalesce into an ensorcelling portal fantasy in which a 15-year-old Black Caribbean British girl travels between contemporary life in Britain and a brewing conflict in the Jamaica-inspired fantasy world she visits in her sleep. Mush dreams of Persea, a realm in which a coven of Black witches opposes a tyrannical king who robs them of their magic by changing their hair texture ("And so, every Black woman at once ceased to know their natural hair"). Their only hope is Zella, a 16-year-old witch the king has imprisoned. In Mush's waking life, she relaxes her hair, hoping to gain favor with her affluent classmates at her predominantly white all-girls school. Meanwhile, Zella and the witches of Persea plot to retake their power. But without Mush, they may not be enough. The mystical world of Persea and its lush natural environment juxtaposed against the austere, rapidly evolving metropolitan landscape is immersive. In both worlds, McLeod (The Map That Led to You) compassionately interrogates the relationship between Black women, their hair, and respectability politics, making for a fine tribute to chosen families, and to Black women in all their rich complexity. Ages 12–up.
