Briar Rose (novel)

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Briar Rose
Right: Paperback Left: Hardcover
Author	Jane Yolen
Country	United States
Language	English
Publisher	Tor Books (hardcover), Tor Teen paperback (paperback)
Publication date	1992
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	224 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0-312-85135-9 (hardcover) ISBN 0-8125-5862-6 (paperback)
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 20
LC Class	PS3575.O43 B75 1992

Briar Rose is a young adult novel written by American author Jane Yolen, published in 1992. The book was published as part of the Fairy Tale Series "Sleeping Beauty" of novels compiled by Terri Windling. The book won the annual Mythopoeic Society Fantasy Award for Adult Literature in 1993. It was also nominated for the Nebula Award.

Plot summary

The book is divided into two parts, the "home", and the "castle". The ending is part of the "home" section, returning after the castle.

The story is based around the German fairy tale of Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty) which is told by "Gemma", an elderly woman, to her three granddaughters. She tells this to the children almost all the time and it is the only bedtime story she ever tells. The times when "Gemma" tells the story are flashbacks and alternate between the present-day story.

"Home"

In the present day, Gemma's Jewish family is living somewhere outside a city in Massachusetts. After her grandmother's death, Rebecca Berlin, the youngest of her three granddaughters (referred to as Becca in the novel) begins to believe that there is some meaning behind the bedtime story that her grandmother told to them hundreds of times. She consults Stan, a good friend and journalist who works for an "alternative" newspaper and uncovers historical facts.

She discovers that her grandmother was actually a survivor of the Holocaust who was persecuted for her Polish ethnicity and Jewish belief, and sent to Chełmno extermination camp to be executed. She decides to visit Chełmno and discovers a link with a man by the name of Josef Potocki in Poland. Becca sets off for Poland to find the identity and the life of her grandmother.

The Castle - Josef's story

In Poland, Josef tells his life story and his meeting with Gemma. In the book, his story is told in the "castle" section. He was a target of the Holocaust due to his homosexuality, and became a fugitive, during which time he met many different people, mainly partisans, mainly in Germany. He had heard stories of torture and extermination camps and joined an underground group set out to rescue victims. This leads him to Chełmno (called Kulmhof by the Germans), where he witnesses the gassing to death of numerous people. The people are brought to the camp and then packed into trucks. The trucks drive away, with their exhaust funnelled into the passenger hold. By the time the trucks arrive at their destination, a mass grave, all of the people it was carrying have been gassed to death by the truck exhaust. The people are then dumped into the grave. When the bodies are dumped one of the partisans, named The Avenger notices that a woman with red hair (Gemma) is still alive and faintly breathing. Josef revives her through mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, which the woman, (who is later called KSIĘŻNICZKA, which means 'princess' in Polish) refers to in her fairy tale as "the kiss of life". In reality, during this period of time, 320,000 were killed in Chelmno via the method of gassing them in trucks.

Later, she hid in the forest with Polish partisans, fighting the Nazis, and married The Avenger. She became pregnant by him shortly after their marriage. Then he, along with almost all of the other partisans, were killed by the Nazis. She escaped and was brought safely to the United States. She never told a soul about these experiences, rather dealing with the trauma by refashioning them in her mind into the form of a familiar fairytale about an evil witch, a princess rendered unconscious who is then revived by a handsome prince, and a happy ending.

'Home Again'

The final part of the book is simply a conclusion where Becca returns to the U.S. to tell Stan and her family about what she discovered. At the airport, Stan is there to pick her up. He kisses her, and says "We'll get to our happily ever after eventually".

Style

Juxtaposition

The story was written to juxtapose the present-day story with the fairy tale that Gemma tells them. In the book, every odd chapter (except for within the Castle) is a flashback to Becca's childhood in which Gemma tells her story to her grandchildren. Gemma is a victim of the holocaust.

Setting at Chełmno

Unlike most stories of the Holocaust, Briar Rose does not focus on the genocide of the Jews specifically but focuses more on that of the Polish. Despite the family in the story being Jewish, Yolen intentionally focused on the extermination camp in the Polish town of Chełmno rather than the more well-known ones of Auschwitz and Treblinka.

Response

Briar Rose has received a very warm response from most critics, especially for its unusual organization. The book is not told in a direct beginning-to-end style, and the story is not told directly to the reader but rather through the fairy tale. Critics praised it for this type of storytelling technique, and in 1992 the Science Fiction Chronicle awarded Briar Rose the Best fantasy Novel of the Year.

Briar Rose was also part of Australia's New South Wales Department of Education and Training's Higher School Certificate curriculum.

Kirsten Dunst has listed it as her favorite book.

Resources

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