The Golden Braid
The Golden Braid
By: Melanie Dickerson
I like the current trend of retelling fairytales. It’s not a new trend, not really, but it is still going strong. I think that this has to do with the success of shows like “Once Upon a Time” and “Grimm,” at least that was when I noticed the trend.
This book caught my eye because it was in the Christian Fiction section of Barnes & Noble. It’s beautiful cover was faced out and I was intrigued by the idea of a Christian version of Rapunzel. When I looked inside the dust jacket, the blurb at the top convinced me to buy it: “The one who needs rescuing isn’t always the one in the tower.” This made me curious about how Melanie Dickerson was going to turn the story upside down.
To be honest, I started this book with high hopes. But it took me a while to really buy into the story and the characters. At first, Rapunzel felt too gullible—and not the cute Tangled version of gullible that makes sense for a girl locked in a tower her whole life. She’s never been locked away, but she does live a sheltered life with her adoptive mother, Gothel. It becomes pretty clear early on that her mother is crazy and controlling. Rapunzel and Gothel move from town to town, without any clear reason other than the mother looking for work as a midwife and wanting to keep the boys away from her daughter. Even Rapunzel questions this though; she doesn’t understand her mother’s need to flee.
Despite Gothel wanting to keep her in the dark and uneducated, Rapunzel longs to be knowledgeable and able to defend herself. She wants to learn how to read. When a knight, Gerek, helps them on the road, there is a definite meet-cute—things don’t go that well and there is a fair amount of bickering, but you know that Gerek and Rapunzel are meant to be together (that is the nature of Romance and Christian Fiction).
I struggled with the first third of this book. I did appreciate the nods to the original fairytale and some of the remakes (like Tangled) while still staying true to this version of the story.
Once Rapunzel got away from Gothel I found myself enjoying the book a lot more—which may be somewhat intentional on the author’s part.
The last third of the book went really quickly—I couldn’t put it down and I finished it in one night and paid for the sleep deprivation the next day. But it was worth it.
So in my recommendation of this book I would say that you have to muscle through the first part and then it will get really good. It’s not that unusual. I generally expect books to get better the further into them I get—the more I believe in the premise the better they are. The danger of retelling fairytales could be that the reader goes into the story with expectations, and if those expectations aren’t met right away it could be a struggle for the reader. I do think that Melanie Dickerson overcame my doubts and went above my expectations and put together a good story in the end.
It’s a story with a happy ending, and that is something I really appreciate in Christian Fiction. I appreciate the hope. And sometimes you need a book with a lot of hope in it.
