War and Roses

Between my love of retold fairy tales and my weird interest in World War II, I decided to to pick up Briar Rose by Jane Yolen.  The book is about Rebecca, a young woman who has been fascinated by her grandmothers telling of Sleeping Beauty.

Her grandmother (who goes by Gemma) does not tell the traditional tale, it is a darker, scarier tale with odd little details. As they grow older Rebecca's sisters outgrow the story but Rebecca always remains at least a little enchanted with it.  After Gemma dies, one of her wishes is for the family to find out about her history, turns out not a lot is known about Gemma after she arrived as a refugee from Europe during World War II, the only clues are in a box of mementos left for the girls.  Becca decides to take on the challenge and follow the clues back to Europe.  SPOILER AHEAD, Becca finds an old friend of her grandmothers who agrees to tell her what he knows of Gemma's story.   Josef Potocki, a gay man who lived in a time and place where it was a deadly crime to be so.  He managed to stay safe until 1940 when his landlady turned him in and he 

was sent to a prison camp.  Even in the camp he was an outcast as being homosexual was not accepted by anyone during that era.  He eventually escapes and is taken in by a woodcutter and his partisan group, which was bent on defying Hilter.  Josef joins the group and helps them with their sometimes ill-conceived plans of doing everything in their power to disrupt Hitler's forces.  The group hears of a secret extermination camp called Chelmno and decide to try and do something about it.  As they stake out the camp they watch in horror as van after van full of dead bodies are brought and dumped into a pit.  After the soldiers have left the men go to the pit and find to their horror the prisoners are not just men, but women and children as well.  Somebody sees movement and realizes that a young woman is still alive.  They give her mouth to mouth and manage to revive her. Turns out that these had been people who were taken to the "castle" and told that they were going to be washed and disinfected and then given a work detail, instead they were stripped, crammed into vans and gassed to death on the way to the dumping pit.  The woman they had saved did not remember anything before being revived except for a dim memory of a fairytale, she said she was a princess in a castle and then the mist came and put her to sleep until she was kissed awake by a prince.  Eventually the rescued girl, who they all called Princess fell in love with one of her rescuers known as Avenger and they got married.  After the marriage the band was caught unawares by soldiers and all but Josef and the girl were killed.  The two got away and discovers that she is pregnant.  The girls new mission is to protect her unborn child and Josef helped her by providing forged documents to get her to America.  He never saw the girl again.  Becca returns home and writes up the story of her grandmother as the princess Brier Rose, happy to have learned what she could of her Gemma's past.

OK so that is the story.  I really wanted to love this book, it is very popular and is on many best of lists, but I just could not get into it.  While I understand what the author was trying to do, fitting it into the Sleeping Beauty fairy tell seemed forced.  Some of the details...I don't know felt like they had to be jury-rigged so that you could fit them into the fairy-tale format.  I was also looking forward to learning some of Gemma's history and other then the rescue from the death-pit (which I kind of figured out pretty quickly was gonna happen) we don't learn anything about her.  I guess I was disappointed because 2/3 of the book take a really long time to get us to the actual story and then the story was kind of disappointing.  Don't take my word for it, I have a really weird sense of how I like my stories to go and a lot of people like books I don't.  This is not that long of a read and the idea of what Ms. Yolen was trying to do with the character's making sense of their life through a fairy tale is a great one, I just felt it was a little forced.  A word of warning, there is some graphic violence, gore so don't let your little one read it without supervision.  I give it 3 out of 5 roses.

What did you think of this book?  Did the Sleeping Beauty story fit in here?  What fairy-tale is your life most like?