Towering

Gr 8 Up—Flinn reinvents the "Rapunzel" story as a teen thriller. Rachel spends her days and nights alone in a tower. Her sole contact with humanity is the daily visit of "Mama," and Rachel both loves and rebels against her jailor. Then Wyatt arrives in town. His mother is hoping that he will begin to recover from his friends' deaths in a car accident. He can't understand why no one in this small town seems perturbed by the number of missing teenagers, one of whom was his mother's best friend. He also can't understand why he is apparently the only one who can hear a girl singing somewhere in the frozen woods. When he sets out to find her, he puts into motion a chain of events that leads him, Rachel, and her "mother" into a showdown with violent drug manufacturers and their imprisoned labor force. Flinn cleverly weaves fantasy and realism together into what seems to be almost a new genre. Rather than the cop-out of a dystopian future setting, her story is grounded in the reality of an upstate New York where unemployment is rife, it is always winter, and there is no cell-phone service. Teens will identify and sympathize with Wyatt's loss and Rachel trapped in her tower, and they will rejoice in the tenderness of their blooming romance amid the menace of drug violence. The author's skillful writing somehow makes it completely plausible that sweetness, innocence, and true love can survive within the contemporary social evils of addiction and abduction-and also that Rachel's golden tresses can grow to reach the ground overnight.—Jane Barrer, United Nations International School, New York City