I finally made my way through this one. It's all over the place. I'm just going to go spoileriffic to try to summarize as best I can.
Young Gothel lives in the dead woods with her mother, the queen of the dead. Her mother is basically a necromancer witch who grows rapunzel to keep herself eternally young. Gothel has two sisters and the three are triplets who look nothing alike. Primrose has red hair and is the perky, nice one. Hazel is the introspective one. She had white or silver hair. I can't recall. Gothel is the one most interested in witchcraft and her mother agrees to begin teaching her, but Primrose is against all of them learning together. There's a lot of drama with this and Manea, their mother, attacks Primrose and Hazel because she really only cares about Gothel. Gothel kills her mother and destroys all but one rapunzel flower in the process.
In the time that follows, Gothel uses her control over the dead to rebuild her life and make the woods a nice home for her sisters, but her sisters have never fully recovered from their mother's attacks. The odd sisters arrive and want to help, but Primrose and Hazel end up dying. In an attempt to help her with her grief, the odd sisters put Gothel into a decades long sleep, possibly for even hundreds of years. It's never specified.
While she's asleep, the sisters are dealing with what happens in the other books. Then the king of the kingdom that grows near the dead woods has a wife having a difficult pregnancy. She needs the rapunzel and Jacob, Gothel's lead zombie guy, gets her and the bodies of her sisters out of the woods, having set up a cottage for her to start a new life in.
Gothel is obsessed with resurrecting her sisters, but the stupidest thing she ever did was not drink the vial of her mother's blood that would have given her magic. She spends years trying to figure out how to bring them back and being angry at the odd sisters for abandoning her.
Eventually, the king's soldiers come for the last rapunzel flower, which is the one the queen eats and it makes Rapunzel magical. Gothel steals the baby, moves to a tower, and she and the odd sisters put Rapunzel to sleep. The life she thinks she has is all a dream until she wakes and the events of the movie occur. Gothel in the book wants Rapunzel to help heal her sisters instead of only keeping herself young. The odd sisters, trying to escape the dreamlands by making themselves look good to Circe, hinder Gothel as much as they can. They tell her that Manea created Gothel magically and the other two aren't her real sisters. The events of the movie play out and Gothel dies.
Circe bitches at the odd sisters, having no plan to free them. She and Snow seem to be about to live happily ever after having adventures in the fairy tale kingdoms.
This book was just weird. I don't think Gothel needed this elaborate necromancy witch backstory. Everything got to be too convoluted, and I have a hard time believing she'd really never drink the blood and gain the powers. She wasn't a likeable character and the odd sisters aren't always, so it was hard to get through this one. The next one is all about the odd sisters, so maybe getting some backstory on them will make me like them better again.
No comments:
Post a Comment