The collaborators of The Uglified Ducky offer another story in that fractured tradition. Storyteller Maynard Moose amplifies the silliness of this hybrid tale with snippets of moose dialect, translated in a glossary. When a witch can’t find a way to keep Punzel’s hair clean (it has become ‘distremely filthified
all full of sticks and twigs and little nastified wudgies of glop’), she locks the girl in a tower. In a contrivance pulled off more amusingly in Leah Wilcox’s Falling for Rapunzel (Putnam, 2003), Punzel misunderstands the prince’s request that she let down her hair and first throws down a pear and chair. When Punzel finally hears right, the ‘chubbified’ prince’s heft catapults the girl out the window when he tries to climb her tresses. Landing in a pond, she’s rescued by ‘eight or nine seven dwarfs,’ but more problems await. Stimson’s quirky digital art has a comedic exaggeration that’s in keeping with the hyperbolic text. The prose, intentionally shot through with malapropisms and bad grammar, won’t be for everyone, but fans should find it a perky read-aloud. Audio CD included. Ages 4
8. (Apr.) Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.