Golden – Cameron Dokey
Original title: Golden (2006)
Series: Once Upon a Time #9
Other books in the series by the same author: The Storyteller’s Daughter (#1), Beauty Sleep (#2), Sunlight and Shadow (#6), Before Midnight (#11), Belle (#14), The Wild Orchid (#15), Winter’s Child (#17), The World Above (#19)

Golden is a retelling of the fairytale Rapunzel. This Rapunzel is, however, different from the one we usually hear about because she is bald. How does this work, you might ask, a bald Rapunzel? It works perfectly fine.

One thing that hit me as soon as I started reading Golden was that it felt like a fairytale. Good, one might think, it is a fairytale retelling after all! Yes, but the other fairytale retellings I have read previously have not had the special fairytale feeling. I have been trying to put my finger on what it is that makes it feel like a fairytale. I think it might be the matter-of-fact way it is told. This fairytale is told from a first person perspective, which might not be the typical in ‘classic fairytales’, but it worked good with this story.

There are some holes in the credibility on this story, but the whole cosy fairytale feeling makes up for it. It is not like all fairytales are all that credible.

The story is written in quite a slow pace but I never felt like it was going too slow. The book is not too long so it does not take that long to read either.

Predictable? Yes and no. There was this one thing that I had my suspicions about for a long time, about Mr. Jones (not the cat one) which turned out to be true. I thought at one point that the ending might not turn out as it might seem it would, but it did, but not really. Some of the credibility holes were in the ending.

In the end of the book is an ‘author’s note’ where Cameron Dokey explains why she chose to do a retelling with a bald Rapunzel. I think it was a very sweet reason.

Golden was over all a cosy and sweet read and I think I will try out a few of the other books in the series as well.