“How do we protect our children”

“How do we protect our children?” is both a question spoken by Cal and a governing concern of the novel. Cal names it as the question inside Rapunzel, then widens it beyond the fairy tale: old fears of danger to children persist in new forms, and neither parental devotion nor vigilance offers a complete defense. Its force comes from the contrast between the wish to keep a child safe and the many ways safety can fail.

The Question Inside Rapunzel

While preparing a puppet show, Cal asks the question quietly. Apollo, looking at the cotton balls in his hand, admits that he does not know the answer. Cal replies, “That’s what Rapunzel is about. That’s the question it’s asking.” The exchange connects the immediate uncertainty of new parenthood to a story told across generations, rather than treating the fairy tale as a lesson with a settled moral.

In the version Cal rehearses, a couple long wishes for a child. The husband steals rapunzel from an enchantress’s garden to satisfy his pregnant wife’s craving; after the enchantress catches him, the couple’s child is eventually taken. Cal draws attention to the parents’ failure to protect the baby, then to the enchantress’s opposite response: she keeps the girl in a tower and tries to control what she can do. Neither neglect nor total supervision secures the child. The prince still finds a way inside, prompting Cal to observe, “No matter what we do, the world finds its way in.”

Care, Absence, and Exposure

The question also resonates in the novel’s more ordinary scenes of parenting. After Brian Kagwa’s birth, Emma Valentine struggles to get him to latch while exhausted and frustrated. Kim Valentine takes the baby so the midwife can check him and his aunt can hold him; Lillian Kagwa comforts Emma and recalls having faced the same difficulty without her own mother present. The scene frames protection as practical, shared care rather than a parent’s solitary mastery.

The sisters’ childhood offers a harsher counterpoint. After a fire, Kim Valentine recounts that emergency responders took her and Emma Valentine to the hospital for smoke inhalation; they remained there for five days, then lived in foster care until Kim turned eighteen. Their memories of Nathan and Pauleen, including Pauleen’s oatmeal cookies, register kindness within a history of displacement. The episode does not turn their survival into proof that children can always be kept safe; it shows how care may have to be supplied by others after a family’s protection has broken down.

Fathers and the Limits of Provision

William Wheeler’s account gives the question an economic and emotional dimension. He tells Apollo Kagwa that his generation treated work and provision as sufficient proof of good fatherhood. Over twenty or twenty-five years, he says, a father might find that his wife and children do not know him closely. For newer parents, both partners may have to work simply to stay afloat. William’s regret is not only that he failed to spend enough time with his family: he also recognizes that he assumed his love for his daughters was obvious, rather than saying it aloud. His reflection distinguishes material provision from the spoken affection and presence that family relationships also require.

Jorgen Knudsen’s account of the Knudsen family’s pact makes the same language of paternal duty more dangerous. He describes children who seemed unprotected as candidates for the troll, and argues that the internet lets a man find such children without leaving home. He compares devices to homes without doors that can be shut or windows that can be latched. His own family history then exposes the harm that can hide inside talk of sacrifice and inheritance: Jorgen says his son believed the troll was a blessing and renewed the pact by taking a child. Kinder Garten, however, describes being abandoned and raised by a man like Jorgen, while using his father’s failure to plan financially to justify what he calls a necessary sacrifice. The competing claims show how the language of protecting or providing for children can be used to defend neglect and violence as well as care.

An Unsettled Answer

The question’s reach extends from family life to the novel’s supernatural dangers. At the Knudsen house, a wall of images traces a succession of infants, making the family’s history of child sacrifice visible as a repeated pattern rather than a single exception. In the later rescue, Apollo and Emma Valentine find Brian Kagwa alive inside the troll after it has swallowed him whole. They pull him out, and the daylight that follows turns the troll to stone. Brian’s extraordinary survival offers a moment of rescue, not a general promise that danger can be prevented.

Cal’s claim that “The new fears are the old fears, and the old fears are ancient” gives the question its broadest frame. The novel places a present-day puppet show, the pressure on working parents, the vulnerability created by connected devices, and an old fairy tale in the same conversation. It does not settle on a perfect method of protection. Instead, it keeps the question open, testing what care demands against the fact that children can be exposed by absence, by misplaced confidence, and by the very people who claim to act for them.