Briar Rose

Author: Jane Yolen
Published: 1992, Tor Books
241 pages

After finishing (and being very disappointed in) Zel, I started rethinking my decision to read Briar Rose, another reimagined fairy tale.  Fortunately, I decided to stick it out… And I couldn’t be happier with my decision!  In case any of you don’t know (I didn’t until I read this book), “Briar Rose” is another name for “Sleeping Beauty.”

To me, Briar Rose represents everything a reimagined fairy tale should be.  The story is new while still being recognizable.  Yolen takes the familiar Sleeping Beauty fairy tale and turns it into a Holocaust mystery.  We follow Becca, our main character, along on her journey to discover where her mysterious Grandmother came from and why she always claimed to be Briar Rose.

I’ve done a lot of Holocaust reading — fiction and non-fiction — but I’ve never read a Holocaust mystery.  “Historical Holocaust fiction” and “fairy tale mystery” are two concepts I would never expect to be a fitting description of a single book, but Yolen manages to pull it off without losing any of the horror of the Holocaust nor the fantasy of a fairy tale.

If you’re interested in Holocaust fiction or nonfiction (I know I am… very morbid, I know.  I’ll also read anything about the death penalty.  I swear I’m not maintaining this blog from inside a psych ward.) then this is a good book to add to your shelf.

Zel

Author: Donna Jo Napoli
Published: 1996, Dutton Books
240 pages

Zel is Napoli’s reimagining of the classic Rapunzel fairy tale.  I seem to be the only person who didn’t enjoy this book.  I have nothing against fairy tale retellings, but I do not think Napoli offers anything fresh or unique to the classic fairy tale, except for giving us more background information and painstakingly (emphasis on the pain) more detail.

Napoli goes in-depth about what it was like for Rapunzel to be locked up in the tower.  Rapunzel eventually goes mad (as would be expected from someone who is locked in isolation for years), and the imagery along the way is absolutely horrifying.  I appreciate that Napoli tries to give us a bit of realism, but for me it was just too much.

Napoli attempts to bring the tale down to earth, and what we end up with is something so grounded that it is a total bore.  It’s nice to see Rapunzel and the prince having actual emotions and fears and faults (as opposed to their stereotypical fairy tale counterparts), but at no point in the book do any of their emotions or fears or faults actually surprise me.  It is exactly what I would have expected from the original fairy tale version, just 240 pages longer.

I am going to stop calling this a “reimagined” fairy tale and call it just an “extended” fairy tale.  Maybe that will make it more tolerable for me.