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A review by nigellicus
Briar Rose by Jane Yolen, Terri Windling
5.0
A woman tells her grandchildren a story. It is the same story over and over again, and neither the woman nor the grandchildren ever seem to tire of it, though over the years their responses to the story become more fractious. On her deathbed, she repeats the story again and again, the story of Briar Rose who sleeps for a hundred years in a castle surrounded by thorns until she is awakened with a kiss. Her last dying wish to her youngest granddaughter, Becca, now a journalist, is to find this fairy-tale castle. An impossible task. After all, it's just a story. But amongst her belongings is a box, and in that box are clues, and those clues will lead Becca to another story hidden behind the fairy tale.
This short, lovely book packs an enormous emotional wallop. It's easy to get a little impatient with the opening chapters of family life and the early stages of the investigation. After all, the canny reader will be well aware of where this is all going. But the domestic scenes, the painstaking search and the long journeys lay the groundwork for the final story, teasing, laying careful threads about family and the job of searching for the truth before finally plunging us into the past, so that the full and devastating power of a lovely, haunting tale pulled from the wreckage of unimaginable horror can only be properly understood in the context of survival and remembrance.
There are those who question whether Art can truly exist in a world where the Holocaust occurred, and in truth this book is a flimsy little thing to set against those years when God, whether real and outside of us or imagined and within us, turned away. But so too are fairy stories, flimsy, ragged things out of the darkest, deepest shadows of history. If works like this add to the remembrance, then perhaps they are justified, but that's not for me to say.
This short, lovely book packs an enormous emotional wallop. It's easy to get a little impatient with the opening chapters of family life and the early stages of the investigation. After all, the canny reader will be well aware of where this is all going. But the domestic scenes, the painstaking search and the long journeys lay the groundwork for the final story, teasing, laying careful threads about family and the job of searching for the truth before finally plunging us into the past, so that the full and devastating power of a lovely, haunting tale pulled from the wreckage of unimaginable horror can only be properly understood in the context of survival and remembrance.
There are those who question whether Art can truly exist in a world where the Holocaust occurred, and in truth this book is a flimsy little thing to set against those years when God, whether real and outside of us or imagined and within us, turned away. But so too are fairy stories, flimsy, ragged things out of the darkest, deepest shadows of history. If works like this add to the remembrance, then perhaps they are justified, but that's not for me to say.