Subject: BRIAR ROSE by Jane Yolen

From: [email-masked] (Evelyn C Leeper +1 908 957 2070)
Date: 8 Nov 92 01:45:57 GMT

BRIAR ROSE by Jane Yolen
                     A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
		      Copyright 1992 Evelyn C. Leeper

     Thank you, Jane Yolen.

     I thanked you last year for THE DEVIL'S ARITHMETIC, a young adult novel
in which a young girl travels back through time to the Holocaust and comes
to a better understanding of her heritage and her family.  And now I thank
you for BRIAR ROSE, in which a woman tries to find out the secret of her
grandmother's past, and why her grandmother was so obsessed with the fairy
tale Briar Rose (a.k.a. Sleeping Beauty).

     For as long as Rebecca can remember, her grandmother Gemma has told
Rebecca and her sisters the tale of Briar Rose (which we know as Sleeping
Beauty).  But more than that, she has told them that SHE is Briar Rose.  Now
that Gemma has died, Rebecca is driven to find out who her grandmother
really was and why she told this story.  Even from the beginning, Rebecca
discovers that much of what she believed about her family history isn't
true.  Eventually her search takes her to Poland and the truth about the
dark time of the Holocaust.

     Yolen has done a very good job in describing a Jewish family and its
history, but what is worth noting is that she has not ignored the other
aspects of the Nazi regime during that period.  One of the primary sources
of information for Rebecca when she travels to Poland is a man who was
imprisoned for his homosexuality.  And the history involves other groups
persecuted as well.  Yolen manages this without minimizing anyone's
suffering--it is not a contest of what group suffered more, but a look at
the people who suffered and how they often worked together against the
horror.

     In my review of Marge Piercy's HE, SHE, AND IT, I talked about how
Piercy told a 16th Century legend, both in its own time and then as a re-
telling in a near-future time, so that we could see that what seemed like
just an old story was still very relevant to the issues that face us today.
In BRIAR ROSE, Yolen takes a fairy tale rather than a legend, but then does
the same thing: shows us that it would be a mistake to write it off as just
another story--shows us that even a fairy tale may have much underlying
truth in what it says.  I have not read the other stories in the "Fairy
Tale" series (of which this is one), so I don't know if that is the usual
approach, but I highly recommend this book.

%A      Jane Yolen
%T      Briar Rose
%I      Tor
%C      New York
%D      1992
%G      ISBN 0-312-85135-9
%O      hardback, US$17.95
%P      190pp
%S      Fairy Tale Series

Evelyn C. Leeper   |   +1 908 957 2070   |   att!mtgzy!ecl or [email-masked]

rec/arts/sf/reviews