Ah, the day of Halloween has arrived and that brings us to our final review of the season. We turn to the works of Serena Valentino once again. In the past, we have looked at two of her books that delve into the lives of Disney Villains before and after the events of their respective movies. Well, it was announced earlier this year, that the fifth book in her series would focus on Mother Gothel. The villain of my favorite Disney movie, nay my favorite movie. So, I was curious and wanted to look at it. I just had to find the right time and I felt that Halloween was the perfect day to review this. If you have read my past reviews of her books, you'll know that they were mixed as I enjoyed her book about The Evil Queen but loathed her Ursula book as it really wasn't about Ursula. Where do I fall on her Gothel book? I'm mixed, part of me wishes that I hated it more as it would make for a more entertaining review but at the same time, I wish that I liked it more. I find myself stuck in the middle with this book as it's not bad but it could be so much better. It's still not a great book and there are some problematic implications within this book. We will get to that as I look at the book in more detail as I look at the plot of the book. (Also, I apologize about not getting to the other reviews but I'll do those next year).
Cover
We've talked about this before with Valentino's other books but these covers are just so drab and boring. However, it is uniformed with the other books in her series. But I still find it kinda dull.
The Plot
I'll give Valentino this much with this book as she is very extensive in covering a wide timeline of Gothel's life from when she is a young witch in training to becoming the villain that we know the villain in the movie. However, it takes a long time to get there as the book can really be divided into two halves. Before Gothel kills her mother and after Gothel kills her mother. As the book opens in a forest outside the kingdom that is never once named Corona and this forest is known as the Dead Woods and this forest is only accessible to witches. When the story starts out, Gothel as a young woman seems a very loving and caring woman that hopes to one day take her mother's position as Queen of the Dead. Which entails raising and killing people that are hiding the dead. This is a ritual that is done by taking the blood of the previous Queen and Gothel wanted to share this with her sisters, Primrose and Hazel but Prim, the youngest of the three refused to do this. This is when Gothel felt that she had no choice but to kill her mother as at one point, she was willing to drain the life from Gothel's sisters. And they were getting sicker by the moment and they even begged their sister to let them die. Oh, and this brings us to one of the most important things, the flower. Yes, you remember the flower from the movie. Well, it turns out that it is the responsibility of the witches to protect the flower. And just guess, what the name of the flower is? Any guesses, the flower is called the rapunzel flower. I kid you not. I was going to chalk this up to laziness but I did look this up and there is precedent here as the original fairy tale took it's name from a real flower known as Campanula rapunculus.
So okay, that is a cool touch and the flower does come to play a large part in the story. But instead of it being used to keep Rapunzel young, Gothel uses it in the hopes to bring her sisters back to life. And even before the Queen uses it, when she falls ill giving birth to Rapunzel, the guards come to find it in the Dead Woods and take it for the previous queen as Gothel is warned by her commanding dead ghost that had a love affair with her mother, Jacob that they need to go. And that is when Gothel leaves the Dead Woods and moves into the kingdom with the bodies of her sisters and the flower. Oh, I've forgotten something as Valentino's characters, The Odd Sisters play a rather prominent role showing up looking for something to help them find their young sister but they lie to Gothel and say that they have come to help her sisters but that is far from the truth. And this is an issue as the book is really interesting before they show up but then the book shifts focus to them for the latter half. It's not as bad as the Ursula book, where they were the main characters in a book that was supposed to be about Ursula but still, I feel they took up too much time.
Now, I'll mention that the book does have some interesting and eerie moments such as when Gothel's mother, Manea sends her army of ghosts to attack a family hiding a dead body and tells her second-in-command, Jacob to leave the wife alive but only because she wants her to remember what she saw that night or when Manea looks into Gothel's heart and sees nothing but blackness. And you even get a rather tragic moment, when Manea kills Gothel's sisters and the words of Gothel's sister, Hazel is.
Let us die
I'll give the book this, it takes time to set up, Gothel's sisters, Primrose and Hazel before they are killed off. And while Hazel isn't developed that well in my opinion, Primrose is interesting as she is the youngest and the face of innocence living in the Dead Woods and wants no part of being a witch even though she knew all her life that is what she would be one day. Her being so innocent actually made her death that much more impactful than I would've thought. I'll even mention that there are some intense moments with Little Rapunzel such as when her nanny, Mrs. Tiddlebottom finds Gothel and The Odd Sisters using the young girl as a way to resurrect Gothel's sisters. It is important to note that they had been dead for hundreds of years at this point.
Okay, while there is a lot to like in this book, I do have some issues. Let me start with a minor one, it seemed an odd decision in the book to have Gothel name Rapunzel as she named her after the flower but I don't think that goes against anything in the movie that much. And it also works to show that Gothel doesn't view Rapunzel as not a human but an object akin to this line from Mother Knows Best.
Shh! Trust me, pet
So, that's fine and that works to show that Gothel is a terrible mother but before we get to an issue involving this number, I have to bring up some issues with the hero characters from the movie. As I mentioned, Gothel has a maid that serves as a nanny to Rapunzel , which means that for a part of Rapunzel's life, she does not live in the tower. No instead for the first eight years of Rapunzel's life is that she is raised by her nanny in a cottage while Gothel continually tries to figure out how to bring her sisters back to life. It's an excessive change and it does kinda contradict the idea that the tower was the only home that Rapunzel knew for the first 18 years of her life. Oh, and Rapunzel wasn't moved to the tower until she was 8 and from when she was 8 to 18, she was placed under a sleeping curse where she only believed that Gothel raised her. Meaning that something such as this is a false memory for Rapunzel in this book.
Which again is a bit frustrating as there is one brief moment in the movie, when Rapunzel reaches out for Gothel as she dies showing that she still cared for her somewhat.
Or perhaps one of the most egregious changes is that Flynn doesn't just stumble upon the tower after stealing the crown. It was fate in the book as The Odd Sisters compelled him to do these things, not because they loved Rapunzel from posing as her aunts but because they hated Gothel and wanted to see Gothel be miserable. I'm sorry but no, that undercuts the growth that Flynn went through on the path to being Eugene again. I could mention how The Odd Sisters gave Pascal as a gift to 8-year old Rapunzel instead of Pascal and Rapunzel meeting after a snake killed Pascal's mom and they become friends after Little Rapunzel realizes that they are both lonely as seen in the show but that is relatively minor.
I can chalk that up to the show and this book being different continuities but that brings me to something that I found infuriating. Okay, this book is titled after Gothel's villain number same as Ursula's book and much like that book, this one adapts the song into a chapter. However, whereas Poor Unfortunate Soul was played straight in the book for the Sea Witch, Mother Knows Best doesn't get the same respect as The Odd Sisters are watching through a mirror and laughing hysterically at how bad a mother, Gothel is. Okay, while that number is flamboyant and over-the-top, it serves a purpose to be that over dramatic in the movie. As it was meant to scare Rapunzel and use her fear of the unknown of what lies beyond the tower.
And as that gif shows, it worked. Let's also address something, while Gothel had her comedic moments, she was not a comedic villain. She was cunning, manipulative and destroyed a young girl's life. So by undercutting this song, you are demeaning the status of the villain that is meant to be the main character of this story.
I could give the book some leeway as the book does adapt the reprise into a chapter and plays it straight but this is still frustrating.
So, this book isn't bad and it's far and above an improvement over the Ursula book but I do wish that it had ended before the events of the movie came into play as when Valentino brings the events of the movie into the book, it becomes less interesting. The story about Gothel growing up as a witch and trying to be a successor for her mother and bringing her sisters back to life is a fascinating read. This book is uneven as the original stuff is pretty good but the stuff from the movie just doesn't really work.
Characters
Gothel
Valentino does a good job with Gothel as showing her as the villain she was in the movie and as the young girl that loved her sisters before she went crazy from loneliness. It really drove her insane but that does bring me to a bit of an issue with this story and the Ursula story that I reviewed earlier this summer. This trend of showing stories from the eyes of villains was popularized by Wicked, more so the musical than the book.
But let's look at something here of importance that distinguishes The Wicked Witch and The Wicked Queen who was the focus from Valentino's first book to characters such as Gothel. I'm not saying characters such as The Wicked Queen or The Wicked Witch didn't have personalities as they did but they weren't as well defined as villains that would follow them. Her main trait in their respective movies was to be scary and they accomplished that rather well. But by the time, you get villains such as Gothel, villains have become more well-rounded characters. We already went over what Gothel's main personality was in the movie.
And well, perhaps you could argue that Valentino could have had more room to play with as Gothel is the newest character that she's written about and not a whole lot has been developed about her outside the movie. Let's take a look see here, at something. Her first book about The Wicked Queen came out 72 years after the fact, her book about the Beast came out 23 years after the animated movie, her book about Ursula came out 23 years after the movie whereas this had an eight year gap between movie and book. What I'm getting at here is that those three characters had become Disney classics by the time, they're books had come out and while I love Tangled, I don't know if Gothel is there yet. So, I think that this allowed Valentino more wiggle room to create mythos for Gothel as she's still relatively new.
So, I'm mixed here as we have a villain that is rather well defined in her movie but really hasn't much building upon her character in outside material. The most I can think of in that regard is that it was shown that Gothel made Rapunzel scared of Christmas in a Christmas story.
So again, I'm mixed on this as a whole. It's not a bad characterization of Gothel but I don't know how much it fits with the Gothel of the movie.
Supporting Characters
Primrose and Hazel
I actually really liked Gothel's sisters as they were really supportive of their sister and you could really feel the love that Gothel had for these two as she went out of her way to do everything in her power to bring them back to life. As the three had a mantra that really summed their sisterhood. And made it sting even more for Gothel after they died.
Sisters together forever
Jacob
Once again, I gotta give props to Valentino for developing an interesting character that was such an interesting part of Gothel's familial life. Yeah, you kinda have to look past the implications that Gothel's mother had a love with him and need I remind you, that he's a spirit. Looking past that, you get the sense that he cares for Gothel and her sisters in fraternal sense and serves as the loving parent that they didn't have in their life. Now, I may have misread Gothel's feelings towards Jacob but there was a sense that she cared for him in a way that could be misconstrued as having a crush on him but I find that minor because he was such a good character and he was finally allowed to rest after the guards came to the Dead Woods, the first time, there was a tinge of sadness but also release.
Lucinda, Ruby, & Martha
I hate these characters so much. I knew that they would be in this book as Valentino uses them to bridge all of her stories together but they eat up so much page space , when these books are meant to focus on the villains that are on the cover of their respective books. It's not as bad her Ursula book, where they end up becoming the main characters. That's not the case here thankfully and it is a good while before they show up in the story and come and go infrequently but even when they show up, they do sometimes take the focus away from Gothel.
Villain
Manea
This character was my biggest concern when this book was announced and Oh My Disney posted an excerpt of the first chapter online. And well, I don't think my fears were unfounded as it was shown that Manea was a terrible mother to Gothel. And I can see what Valentino was going for with this character as she wanted to show that Gothel was a terrible mother as she had a terrible mother. I don't want to say that it was she used this way to justify Gothel's actions as I really hope that wasn't the case but the problematic aspect of this character comes from how she's used as this character seems to imply that if you had a terrible parent, you'll be a terrible parent.
As a character herself, Manea was shown to be a being of complete evil and not caring for anyone save maybe Jacob but she always thought Gothel's sisters especially Primrose were weak. She served her purpose well but I'm still mixed on what she was meant to represent.
My Final Thoughts
This is not a bad book and it's certainly better than the last outing that we looked at from Valentino over the summer but I find myself mixed as I felt there were some problematic such as Manea and the alterations made to the events from the movie were a bit annoying. But when the book was telling an original story about Gothel before the events of the movie, this was a decent book that delved into her descent into villainy and becoming who she was in the movie. Still, I think the book would've been a little better if it had ended before the events of the movie started.
Happy Halloween!
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