A review by whilhelminaharker
Briar Rose by Jane Yolen

5.0

A mist still lay all about the walls and floors, hovering like a last breath on the lips of all the sleepers. As he walked through the castle, he marveled at how many lay asleep: the good people, the not-so-good, the young people and the not-so-young, and not one of them stirring. Not one.

There is a constant argument going on in the world of historians and artists - to what extent is it acceptable to create art about the Holocaust? Is it heinous to create beauty out of something so deeply horrific? Or is it a natural response to a collective trauma that the world, even almost a century later, hasn't really processed?(and let's pray we never do. To understand and accept an act of such pure evil is something that I hope we as human beings aren't capable of.)

I don't have an answer to these questions. But Jane Yolen certainly has her own fascinating perspective.

Briar Rose is the story of a young woman named Becca who grew up entranced by her grandmother's dark, unsettling, odd version of the Sleeping Beauty myth - a myth made only more complex by her grandmother's repeated insistence that she is Briar Rose. When her grandmother uses her last breaths to make Becca swear that she will find "the castle" and "the prince" and solve the mystery, Becca's whole family dismisses it as the addled ramblings of a feeble old mind. But Becca knows there is more there. She believes it. She believes that there is a metaphorical curse on her family history that she must break. And as she delves deeper and deeper into the mist that was her grandmother's previous life, she uncovers horrors beyond anyone's imagining.

Becca is a journalist - a storyteller for the modern era, one who doesn't break curses through true love and kisses, but through facts and whistleblowing and investigation. She tells her stories by making everything as clear as possible. Gemma was a storyteller who told her stories by obscuring everything in layers of metaphor and symbolism, because the real truth was too terrifying to even think about. With Gemma's stories, fairy tales and history became one and the same. Fairy tales are an oral tradition; they are passed down from generation to generation. Family history, and in this case first-hand accounts of the Holocaust, operate the same way.

Storytelling is the central theme of this book - and more importantly, the question of why and how we tell stories. We oftentimes don't know what to do with stories about the Holocaust; we simply don't know how to process them, how to think about them. We have to know them, to talk about them, but as the years go on and on, they start to seem more like myth. Like legend, like something that could only have happened once upon a time. Like fairytales.

But we can not and should not be satisfied by viewing these stories through the lens of unreality. We have to dig. We have to find the truth. Like Becca, it is the responsibility of storytellers everywhere to keep stories alive. To pass them down. To not let them fade away and be forgotten, as so many folk tales and oral legends do.

Becca is the prince in this story; the one who traverses walls of barbed wire thorns and streets of corpses sleeping folk to break the spell. And she succeeds. But in the end, she can not undo what has been done. She sees the horrible truth with the fairytale stripped away, and there is nothing she can do but try to come to terms with such horrifying, all-encompassing destruction. And that is the nature of art and stories about the Holocaust. We must make them, because we seek to understand, and to know, and to lift some burden - but in the end it changes nothing. We can never know or understand. All we can do is put it out into the world, and hope that this one more voice, this one more story, will be remembered, and not left to rot in some impenetrable, forgotten, death-like sleep.