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3.78 AVERAGE
3.78 AVERAGE
What a beautiful and poignant re-telling of Sleeping Beauty. Yolen combined a version of Sleeping Beauty with the tragedy and horrors of the Holocaust. After the death of her grandmother, Gemma, her granddaughter seeks to fulfill a promise made - never to forget the story Gemma always told of Briar Rose. But the granddaughter is certain that there is more to the story. Taking the meager details known of Gemma's life, the granddaughter returns to the old country to discover the truth to both Briar Rose and Gemma.
I love the story of Sleeping Beauty. This semi-retelling was beautifully written and very thought provoking.
After making a promise to her dying grandmother, our protagonist Becca decides to go on a quest to find out the truth of her grandmother's life. Sound like the beginning of a fairy tale adventure? Well, why not make the grandmother the survivor of the holocaust, our heroine a reporter, and frame the whole story with a strange version of Sleeping Beauty?
The premise of this book is solid, and the actual truth of the grandmother's - or Gemma's - life is well-written, but Becca failed to interest me as a protagonist. The other characters in the family were equally dry at best or insufferable at worst except for Gemma. The short chapters that featured Gemma telling her version of Sleeping Beauty, and finding out how all the pieces fit together made the book worthwhile to me, and I wouldn't necessarily hesitate to recommend it to a YA patron, but overall a lot of the book fell flat to me. I think Yolen is excellent at crafting a story and an overall swell person, but the dialogue in this book is pretty cringe-y. No one speaks in unison that often! People use contractions when they talk!
Anyway, minor nitpicks. It's certainly not a bad book, and of course the imagery of WWII is always going to be powerful, and the way she chose to unfold everything was pretty great. 3/5
The premise of this book is solid, and the actual truth of the grandmother's - or Gemma's - life is well-written, but Becca failed to interest me as a protagonist. The other characters in the family were equally dry at best or insufferable at worst except for Gemma. The short chapters that featured Gemma telling her version of Sleeping Beauty, and finding out how all the pieces fit together made the book worthwhile to me, and I wouldn't necessarily hesitate to recommend it to a YA patron, but overall a lot of the book fell flat to me. I think Yolen is excellent at crafting a story and an overall swell person, but the dialogue in this book is pretty cringe-y. No one speaks in unison that often! People use contractions when they talk!
Anyway, minor nitpicks. It's certainly not a bad book, and of course the imagery of WWII is always going to be powerful, and the way she chose to unfold everything was pretty great. 3/5
hopeful
sad
medium-paced
first Yolen I have read - good, if a bit heartwrenching
I can't deny the idea behind this "sleeping beauty" retelling is quite clever and seducing.
Also learning that the writer isn't some Christian (or any other "goy") who simply got inspired and made money out of a tragedy like the Shoah is a big relief.
And I for one was actually pleasantly surprised that there was some gay representation, especially since it was published more than two decades ago.
But I personally didn't enjoy reading the story, mostly because I disliked Becca very much.
She sounds too much like a "special snowflake" ("look I'm the only nice sibling, I'm the only one who gets my grandma and we have a special bond because we look alike, boohoo my older sisters are meanies but I forgive them because I'm that nice" - I thought I was reading an adaptation of Sleeping Beauty not Cinderella...). And the whole dialogues where she constantly corrects Magda's English don't add anything to the story, if anything they make you dislike Becca more.
Actually barely any of the characters were endearing. And it's really a shame because well-written characters usually drive the plot and help the reader feel more invested in the story.
Now, regarding the editing of the book. One should do their homework before publishing novels. German nouns ALWAYS start with a capital letter. I mean the fact that the novel actually opens with this kind of rookie mistake could easily make you close the book right away if you are more of a language purist. Just like it's great to write Polish city names in Polish, but when you can't manage to actually type them properly it's not very great anymore. The letter "ú" doesn't exist in Polish, so there is no city called "Torún" there, it's "Toruń" thank you very much.
Sure those mistakes are not dramatic, but they still lead to emotional distance between the reader and the story.
All in all, I don't regret reading Briar Rose. Yet I can't shake the feeling that this read could easily have been much more satisfying.
Also learning that the writer isn't some Christian (or any other "goy") who simply got inspired and made money out of a tragedy like the Shoah is a big relief.
And I for one was actually pleasantly surprised that there was some gay representation, especially since it was published more than two decades ago.
But I personally didn't enjoy reading the story, mostly because I disliked Becca very much.
She sounds too much like a "special snowflake" ("look I'm the only nice sibling, I'm the only one who gets my grandma and we have a special bond because we look alike, boohoo my older sisters are meanies but I forgive them because I'm that nice" - I thought I was reading an adaptation of Sleeping Beauty not Cinderella...). And the whole dialogues where she constantly corrects Magda's English don't add anything to the story, if anything they make you dislike Becca more.
Actually barely any of the characters were endearing. And it's really a shame because well-written characters usually drive the plot and help the reader feel more invested in the story.
Now, regarding the editing of the book. One should do their homework before publishing novels. German nouns ALWAYS start with a capital letter. I mean the fact that the novel actually opens with this kind of rookie mistake could easily make you close the book right away if you are more of a language purist. Just like it's great to write Polish city names in Polish, but when you can't manage to actually type them properly it's not very great anymore. The letter "ú" doesn't exist in Polish, so there is no city called "Torún" there, it's "Toruń" thank you very much.
Sure those mistakes are not dramatic, but they still lead to emotional distance between the reader and the story.
All in all, I don't regret reading Briar Rose. Yet I can't shake the feeling that this read could easily have been much more satisfying.
As a child, I went through multiple phases where the only books I read were MG and YA centered on the Holocaust. I would say that Devil's Arithmetic set me off as an eight-year-old, as well as having multiple survivors speak to us at different times.
I'm Polish on my dad's side, yes, but they left the country long before WWII. Before WWI. And were Catholic. (Not that being Polish Catholic was much of a shield, in the end.) My interest was separate from myself.
But somehow, I missed Briar Rose when I was a kid.
I don't know how, because its use of a fairy tale to extrapolate on the horrors of the Holocaust combined two elements I was interested in the most, fantasy and, well, I already talked about the other one.
This book is interesting because according to the rules of modern publishing and YA, this shouldn't be YA at all. None of the characters are teenagers. The protagonist is in her early twenties. She works at a left-wing newspaper. Her sisters have children. While there are flashback scenes with their grandmother ("Gemma") telling the story of Briar Rose to her granddaughters as young kids, that's not YA, either.
But the pacing and tightness absolutely speak of young adult, and Jane Yolen's wonderful skills with words were really welcome after reading a lot of YA novels with similar, somewhat juvenile writing. We already know Yolen is a master and a legend of YA, so I don't have to explain why.
Briar Rose is about the youngest grandchild of Gemma, whose origins and even real name aren't known by her only daughter, or anyone else. All through her life, she's told the story of Briar Rose as a way to explain her past, but no one took her very seriously. Until she dies, leaving a box of documents that tell a different story.
Becca, our heroine, has a deathbed promise to fulfill, and her journey will lead her to Poland, to the horrors of Chełmno, and to a harrowing tale of escape and love.
This is a take on the Holocaust that I greatly appreciated. While Becca's family is Jewish, when she arrives in Poland and discovers a man who helped rescue Gemma, alive, from a mass grave outside Chełmno, we get the story of what it meant to be gay during this time, too. We get to see the pink triangle. The 175ers. Because the man telling the story, the man who resuscitated Gemma, was gay, and had escaped Sachsenhausen. Roma are also mentioned here, about their slaughter at Chełmno and everywhere else.
People sometimes forget where the pink triangle came from, that it was once worn like the yellow star. LGBTQIA+ centered Holocaust books aren't common, so it's always wonderful to see one. To remind people that, yes, hating someone because they were born differently from you is harmful. It is what the Nazis sanctioned. If you find LGBTQIA+ people uncomfortable or wrong, go ahead and place yourself with the townspeople outside Sachsenhausen, throwing garbage at the inmates and calling them (tw: slur) faggots.
Go on. Do it.
I'm Polish on my dad's side, yes, but they left the country long before WWII. Before WWI. And were Catholic. (Not that being Polish Catholic was much of a shield, in the end.) My interest was separate from myself.
But somehow, I missed Briar Rose when I was a kid.
I don't know how, because its use of a fairy tale to extrapolate on the horrors of the Holocaust combined two elements I was interested in the most, fantasy and, well, I already talked about the other one.
This book is interesting because according to the rules of modern publishing and YA, this shouldn't be YA at all. None of the characters are teenagers. The protagonist is in her early twenties. She works at a left-wing newspaper. Her sisters have children. While there are flashback scenes with their grandmother ("Gemma") telling the story of Briar Rose to her granddaughters as young kids, that's not YA, either.
But the pacing and tightness absolutely speak of young adult, and Jane Yolen's wonderful skills with words were really welcome after reading a lot of YA novels with similar, somewhat juvenile writing. We already know Yolen is a master and a legend of YA, so I don't have to explain why.
Briar Rose is about the youngest grandchild of Gemma, whose origins and even real name aren't known by her only daughter, or anyone else. All through her life, she's told the story of Briar Rose as a way to explain her past, but no one took her very seriously. Until she dies, leaving a box of documents that tell a different story.
Becca, our heroine, has a deathbed promise to fulfill, and her journey will lead her to Poland, to the horrors of Chełmno, and to a harrowing tale of escape and love.
This is a take on the Holocaust that I greatly appreciated. While Becca's family is Jewish, when she arrives in Poland and discovers a man who helped rescue Gemma, alive, from a mass grave outside Chełmno, we get the story of what it meant to be gay during this time, too. We get to see the pink triangle. The 175ers. Because the man telling the story, the man who resuscitated Gemma, was gay, and had escaped Sachsenhausen. Roma are also mentioned here, about their slaughter at Chełmno and everywhere else.
People sometimes forget where the pink triangle came from, that it was once worn like the yellow star. LGBTQIA+ centered Holocaust books aren't common, so it's always wonderful to see one. To remind people that, yes, hating someone because they were born differently from you is harmful. It is what the Nazis sanctioned. If you find LGBTQIA+ people uncomfortable or wrong, go ahead and place yourself with the townspeople outside Sachsenhausen, throwing garbage at the inmates and calling them (tw: slur) faggots.
Go on. Do it.
This book was just okay, it was slow moving and punctuated. It’s not super interesting, but for short snippets. The bulk of the real history, though, is not relayed until the last section, the last 75 pages, and half of that, almost isn’t very interesting either, as it’s the history of some other survivor of that time period, another character who hadn’t been present in the rest of the book. There is a vein of the Briar Rose story line interspersed as well, though. It does tell of real places, in real history, that I never knew about, and real happenings that I didn’t realize happened either. It definitely makes me want to research more about what happened, and to learn more.
For more, please see my blog review: https://faithfullymoonstruck.wordpress.com/2020/03/22/book-review-briar-rose/
For more, please see my blog review: https://faithfullymoonstruck.wordpress.com/2020/03/22/book-review-briar-rose/
Wow. This book was not at all what I expected, but it was a brilliant and haunting retelling of Sleeping Beauty. Definitely recommend.