Originally reviewed on The Book SmugglersFor as long as she can remember, Becca has been enamored, frightened, and captivated by her Grandmother Gemma's favorite story - that of Briar Rose, and the awful sleeping curse placed on her and all her people by the cruel fairy with black boots and emblazoned with silver eagles. As the years pass, while Becca's sisters start their own families and tire of Gemma's Sleeping Beauty story, Becca remains ever faithful and dedicated to her grandmother - even when Gemma's grasp on reality seems to be slipping as she claims that she is Briar Rose. On her deathbed, Gemma makes Becca swear to find Gemma's castle, and the truth behind Gemma's life. With a box of trinkets and a fairy tale as her only clues to her grandmother's past, Becca starts her investigation into Gemma's life. What she finds leads her on the path to a small town in 1940s Poland, to a place where Gemma's fairy tale intertwines with threads of memory and truth. "Both the oral and the literary forms of the fairy tale are grounded in history: they emanate from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors.”- Jack Zipes, Spells of EnchantmentSo begins Briar Rose, with this epigraph from Jack Zipes - and how incredibly fitting and haunting this truth is. When I picked up Briar Rose, I was expecting a fairy tale. A fantasy novel. A dark fantasy, to be sure, but something firmly rooted in the soil of speculative fiction. I was not expecting this haunting, heartbreaking tale of memory, family, and the Holocaust, using Sleeping Beauty as a very loose metaphor. Like many young adults, I attended elementary and middle schools that assigned works of historical fiction that examined the brutality and horror of the Holocaust - novels like Lois Lowry's Number the Stars or Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic, or of course the haunting autobiographical The Diary of Anne Frank. As a young reader, it is hard to grasp the enormity, the sheer scale of death and the atrocity of the Holocaust - but books like these help give a tangible perspective of such madness and genocide. They also allow us to contemplate and remember this unconscionably dark chapter of human history.Jane Yolen's Briar Rose is another such book. It is a book that forces us to confront and to remember, told through the eyes of a 23-year-old that uncovers the hidden past of her beloved grandmother. As Becca strings together the clues left behind by Gemma in the handful of documents, keepsakes, and the fable Gemma never stopped telling, the full picture of Gemma's past comes into focus. It's a past which leads Becca to the small Polish town of Chelmno, a place whose picturesque, quiet serenity belies the atrocities that occurred there. Briar Rose is a contemplative novel that tells the story not only of Gemma, not only of the Jews taken to the camps - it's also about the Pink Triangle laws and the homosexual males so reviled by the Nazis. It's about the gypsies, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and all the other "undesirables" sent en masse to extermination camps like Chelmno. It's also the contemporary story of Becca, a young woman learning about her grandmother and finding her own voice in the process. While the writing for this book might not be the most refined and is quickly dated (imagine a genealogical search that does not involve the internet, in a time when the Soviet Union was still unified, and when hunting down information leads and passports took weeks, even months, to pursue), it is a powerful and resonant story.From the onset, Briar Rose has an air of sadness and distance, and learning about Gemma's past and all that she has endured and her fixation with the Briar Rose fairy tale is poignant and heartbreaking in its stark truth: Gemma tells her fairy tale over and over again throughout the novel in a series of flashbacks, because it is her past. Is Briar Rose a fairy tale? It is and it isn't. It is allegory, and it is truth. It is powerful, and it is raw. Even if Gemma may not remember her past, her story is uncovered from the fog that ensorcells the princess and her kingdom, coaxed awake by Becca so many decades later. Though Gemma's tale is one of indescribable horror, it has its own happy ending.
This book is a very loose retelling of Sleeping Beauty. Like, very loose. A young woman must find out why her grandmother's life revolved around the tale of Sleeping Beauty, and her research takes her to Poland, where she finds the truth.To start off with, the pacing of this story was really hard to follow. At times, it was easy to get into, and then it would abruptly change into something dull and tedious, and I'd feel compelled to skip past it. I noticed that the slow parts occured when nothing of value or interest occured, and things would just drag on. Until the second half of the book or so, when we get the perpective of Josef. It seemed as if Yolen had added in those unnecessary tidbits to lengthen her already short novel.The writing itself is nothing impressive, was sometimes slow and unclear. It distracted me from the story sometimes, which is obviously not a good thing. It only started to get better--more fast-paced and intriguing-- when it started following from the perspective of osef, instead of Becca.That being said, the characters were quite flat and annoying, except for Gemma, when she was still alove. The dialogue of all the other characters was frustrating and made me groan. I really disliked Becca, she seemed like the worst, most boring protagonist ever. I couldn't understand her thoughts most of the time, which was incredibly annoying.I found the romance between her and Stan to be non-existant. It was disappointing, slow and lacked that special something, that spark that made it work. It just seemed like some boring, awkward friendship between two very awkward people who didn't want a relationship. When they finally kissed at the end, I was bored and unimpressed, taking no interest in the event due to the very poor build up of their relationship.The only character that I found to be tolerable was Josef, during the second half of the book. It was also the time that the story started picking up, when I finally found myself unable to put the book down. When Josef tells Becca and Magda his story and his survival in Poland during the war, and the story of Gemma, Becca's grandmother, it was touching, and really played on my emotiions. It was then that I really started to care for this book and for the characters. That was one of the two things that redeemed this book for me.The other redeeming quality was the story in itself. It is a really sweet Sleeping Beauty retelling. That, combined with the Holocaust made it a really strong and emotional story that really hit close to home. Both my parents are from Poland, so I know so many stories about the war. Holocaust stories are something very special to me, I just love them. Stories like Night by Elie Weisel and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak really make me emotionally attatched to them, simply because I understand them. I've had grandparents and uncles and parents and family friends tell me every memory of the war that they have.So, that made it a really good book for me.If the story hadn't have started so late in the book, and the other characters (especially Becca, the main character) then I would have given this novel a rating of 5. But alas, it doesn't get that.I'd definitely reccomend this story. Slow or not, it is a brilliant retelling.
What do You think about Briar Rose (2002)?
Okay, I actually couldn't finish this because the writing was deeply awful (which is a shame, because I thought the plot was very interesting), but I have to post a review just so I can include the line that had me and my husband laughing ourselves silly. Real line, really included in this book, really not removed by her editor:"Her eyebrows worked independently of one another, which gave her the look of a slightly demented dove." (Followed by: "Becca decided she liked that.")So many questions raised here . . . how do eyebrows work independently? Why, exactly, would that make anyone look like a dove? And good heavens, why a "slightly demented dove?" If I ever meet Jane Yolen, these will be the questions I ask.
—Rachel
An installment in Terri Windling's "Fairy Tale Series."This book is not actually a fairy tale or fantasy at all... it deals with a young woman searching for the truth about her grandmother's life. The grandmother had always been loving, but a little bit eccentric, and obsessed with the story of Sleeping Beauty, or Briar Rose. Her granddaughter, Becca, makes her a deathbed promise to 'find the castle,' which she interprets as a request to find out the truth of how the metaphor of Sleeping Beauty applied to her grandmother's life. Her research takes her to Poland, and the site of one of the Nazis' most horrific extermination camps.Overall, this was a very good book, but I thought Becca's character was both just a little bit too saintly and too innocent.Her sisters were treated rather harshly for essentially, being normal.Also, Yolen's portrayal of Poland seemed to me to be a little bit out of date for 1992 - and as someone who loves old Europe, her portrayal of the country seemed somewhat uncharitable.I preferred the parts of the book that had to do with the events of the 1940s much more - the narrator of that part of the story, Josef, was much more interesting to me.Note: for anyone looking for a fantasy that weaves in a girl's WWII experiences, I just finished Lisa Goldstein's 'The Red Magician' (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) and would highly recommend it.
—Althea Ann
If you don't know me, I'm going to tell you straight off that Sleeping Beauty is my favorite Disney movie. So when my friend gave me this book, I was immediately intrigued. Holy shit was that intense. Briar Rose is the tale of Sleeping Beauty, but not the classic 'pricks her finger on a spindle, sleeps, wakes up by a prince's kiss' fairy tale we're all used to. This Sleeping Beauty is told in flashbacks by a grandmother to her grandchildren. It's only when the grandmother dies, that we begin to understand what the story meant.Gemma, the grandmother, is Sleeping Beauty - a tale her grandchildren aren't too sure about. When Gemma passes away, Becca (the youngest grandchild) promises Gemma that she will find her grandmother's 'castle'. This promise sends Becca on a wild chase deep into her grandmother's past, a past that no one knows about. Through conversations with Jewish immigrants, interviews with concentration camp survivors, and ultimately ending in a trip to Poland, Becca begins to unravel the secret that was her grandmother. Told as a fairy tale, but laced with historical undertones, Briar Rose takes what you think you know about Sleeping Beauty and merges it with a tale of survival and rescue from one of the most horrific concentration camps under Nazi rule. I was unprepared for how this book made me feel. The haunting tale at the end will stay with me for awhile. But I am very glad that I read this.
—Jenn
