Briar Rose

by Jane Yolen

[nannah]

(3.5 stars)

I'm very confused about my feelings on this one . . .

On one hand, I didn't expect the inclusion of a gay character and the book to show what happened to gay people during the Holocaust and was so pleasantly surprised. On the other . . . I really hated the MC, Becca and therefore could not get invested in her personal story.

Briar Rose tells the story of Gemma, a woman who uses the story of Sleeping Beauty as a coping mechanism to live with her experiences in the Holocaust. Her role in the story is to tell the story of 'Briar Rose' (Sleeping Beauty) over and over (unfortunately, that is her only role) so that after her death, her granddaughter, Becca, will have the motive to go to Poland and discover what happened to her during the Holocaust.

Becca is the epitome of an entitled American. In Poland, she keeps correcting the English of the girl she meets (. . . in Poland . . . where she is a guest). The girl didn't ask for her to do this beforehand; Becca just did it automatically, as if the rest of the world should know and practice English. She has no interest in learning a bit of Polish either, of course. She may have a job in journalism and editing, but that doesn't mean she has a right to act like the rest of the world should be English-speaking and should cater to her needs.

She's also pretty homophobic herself (can't even walk arm-in-arm with her friend), so the inclusion of the lgbt narrative confuses me.

Anyway, I just can't decide whether I like or dislike this story.