Briar Rose

3.5/5 Stars

beautifully done

After making a promise to her dying grandmother, our protagonist Becca decides to go on a quest to find out the truth of her grandmother's life. Sound like the beginning of a fairy tale adventure? Well, why not make the grandmother the survivor of the holocaust, our heroine a reporter, and frame the whole story with a strange version of Sleeping Beauty?

The premise of this book is solid, and the actual truth of the grandmother's - or Gemma's - life is well-written, but Becca failed to interest me as a protagonist. The other characters in the family were equally dry at best or insufferable at worst except for Gemma. The short chapters that featured Gemma telling her version of Sleeping Beauty, and finding out how all the pieces fit together made the book worthwhile to me, and I wouldn't necessarily hesitate to recommend it to a YA patron, but overall a lot of the book fell flat to me. I think Yolen is excellent at crafting a story and an overall swell person, but the dialogue in this book is pretty cringe-y. No one speaks in unison that often! People use contractions when they talk!

Anyway, minor nitpicks. It's certainly not a bad book, and of course the imagery of WWII is always going to be powerful, and the way she chose to unfold everything was pretty great. 3/5