scioscribe (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
scioscribe) wrote2019-06-10 09:47 am
scioscribe) wrote2019-06-10 09:47 am
Briar Rose, by Jane Yolen
The premise of blending the Holocaust with the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale--or any fairy tale--seems so likely to go horribly, offensively wrong that I think most authors would never have tried it. And they would have been wise in that, because most people wouldn't be able to tell that story profoundly, respectfully, and movingly. Jane Yolen is the exception. Briar Rose is a beautiful novel that threads the needle between despair and hope and uses its fairy tale not as a false reassurance that everything's going to turn out okay but as a look at the way we use stories to structure our lives and the way highly symbolic stories can resonate deeply with us.
Becca is a young journalist whose beloved grandmother, called Gemma, is dying. Becca has been close to Gemma her whole life, but that doesn't make Gemma any less of an enigma to her. No one in the family is entirely sure of Gemma's real name or the facts behind how she came to America; no one knows why she was obsessed with the story of Sleeping Beauty and why she claimed it had all really happened to her. In the wake of her death, Becca investigates all of this, digging deeply into the past. I think the realistic, imperfect details of Becca's sections are key to making the story work. She's very much in the middle of a non-fairy tale life. It's a good life, but it's full of bickering sisters and mild family tensions and the long wait between someone promising they'll send you an article and them actually doing it. Life is full of little tangles--Gemma's wake is more crowded than her funeral because a lot of their Catholic neighbors still won't go to a synagogue, neighbors bring flowers to the funeral even though that's not Jewish tradition, the family has to cover the mirrors not because they care about that but because the rabbi is coming and he'll care...
And in the midst of all that, Becca is chasing horrors and history and fairy tales. The contrast makes it work--and when we finally get a good look at the part of Gemma's history that mirrors Sleeping Beauty, Yolen is unflinching about the realism surrounding that, too. Becca's grandmother got one magical awakening, but it's in the middle of war and horror and moral compromises, narrated by a man who is acutely aware of his own weaknesses and failings.
This is a small-scale, strange novel, and one well-worth reading if you haven't stumbled across it yet.
Becca is a young journalist whose beloved grandmother, called Gemma, is dying. Becca has been close to Gemma her whole life, but that doesn't make Gemma any less of an enigma to her. No one in the family is entirely sure of Gemma's real name or the facts behind how she came to America; no one knows why she was obsessed with the story of Sleeping Beauty and why she claimed it had all really happened to her. In the wake of her death, Becca investigates all of this, digging deeply into the past. I think the realistic, imperfect details of Becca's sections are key to making the story work. She's very much in the middle of a non-fairy tale life. It's a good life, but it's full of bickering sisters and mild family tensions and the long wait between someone promising they'll send you an article and them actually doing it. Life is full of little tangles--Gemma's wake is more crowded than her funeral because a lot of their Catholic neighbors still won't go to a synagogue, neighbors bring flowers to the funeral even though that's not Jewish tradition, the family has to cover the mirrors not because they care about that but because the rabbi is coming and he'll care...
And in the midst of all that, Becca is chasing horrors and history and fairy tales. The contrast makes it work--and when we finally get a good look at the part of Gemma's history that mirrors Sleeping Beauty, Yolen is unflinching about the realism surrounding that, too. Becca's grandmother got one magical awakening, but it's in the middle of war and horror and moral compromises, narrated by a man who is acutely aware of his own weaknesses and failings.
This is a small-scale, strange novel, and one well-worth reading if you haven't stumbled across it yet.
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uses its fairy tale not as a false reassurance that everything's going to turn out okay but as a look at the way we use stories to structure our lives and the way highly symbolic stories can resonate deeply with us.
Yes, this. And also Yolen knows that fairy tales, which can be extremely dark, can make more sense as a framework for extreme situations than stories we consider "realistic." The people who survived the Holocaust, more often than not, only did so because of a long sequence of coincidences, unlikely escapes, and weird events; everyone who didn't get those, or who had only five skin-of-their-teeth escapes rather than six, became one of the 6 million. That's especially brought home in Yolen's chilling afterward, where she notes that in real life, of the 300,000 people at Chelmno, only seven survived.
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No, I picked this up at that sprawling barn-based bookstore I told you about, the one on the coast. It only cost a dollar and was in perfect condition: definitely money well-spent.
And yes to everything you said about the way the fairy tale rescue highlights the extreme, near-impossible circumstances it took to survive. And it captures the weight of the town's curse, which is a different Sleeping Beauty twist--they willfully slept, ignoring what they should have stopped, and now they have to live with that forever.