Rapunzel a Groovy Fairytale

Rapunzel a Groovy Fairy tale Retold by: Lynn Roberts Illustrated by: David Roberts
A classic story of a young girl with extremely long hair kept high up away from the world is retold in this 1970’s themed story of Rapunzel. Rapunzel is a beautiful girl with ridiculously long, bright red hair, and a mean Aunt Esme and her pet crow, Roach living atop the tallest apartment building in New York City. Rupenzel was young when both her parents die and left her with her mean aunt who forbids him to leave the building declaring that it’s too dangerous for a girl such as her. So instead, to stop Rapunzel from leaving her mean aunt brings home second hand records, scarves, and belts that her pet crow has stolen from the children at the school where she is the lunch lady at. One day however, when Esme leaves, a surprised Rapunzel meets a young boy who climbed up her hair with the eagerness to meet her. The boy’s name was Roger and from that day on every time Rapunzel’s aunt Esme left, the two children got together to listen to music, talk, and even plan Rapunzels escape. Everything was set in action until one day Esem found out about Roger and kicked Rapunzel out but not before chopping off her hair. At the end of the story Rapunzel ended up finding Roger singing at a local school. Rapunzel decided to join their band and make music. Rapunzel then decided to use her fast growing, long, brightly red hair to make wigs in every style shape, and fashion.
This story was groovy (if I must say). I liked the carefree feel of the story verses the original Rapunzel and I thought the author did a great job in bringing out the characters to make them special in their own way. Esme was the horribly mean aunt who rode a motorcycle with the license plate “evil”. Rapunzel was the young helpless yet beautiful girl and Roger was the musical, inspirational hero. The author used a lot of adjectives and described the events very easily with no room for confusion. Strength in this story lies in the pictures. The cartoon pictures bring light to the situations and characters being presented in the plot. On every spread is one full page of a brightly colored picture and then on the other side is a full page of big text and a smaller picture. This layout makes it fun for a child to read and keeps them motivated to turn the next page to not only read the text but to see the fantastic pictures that go along with it. I would use this as a read aloud in a younger elementary classroom for a comparison assinment. I could read this version and then read another version and have the children compare the two. What is different about them or how are they the same. I think the children will have fun with this assignment!