Literary Devices in Briar Rose
Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Setting
The timeline of the story is a tad bit complicated, but we won't let it bake your noodle. Here's the deal: Briar Rose shifts back and forth between the present (in this case, the early 1990s, when...
Narrator Point of View
Fairy tales are big on third-person narrators—that is, a speaker who's not a character in the story itself. Briar Rose isn't a fairy tale, but it is a novel about fairy tales, so it makes sense t...
Genre
Briar Rose isn't a straightforward fairy tale: instead, it's a retelling of Sleeping Beauty folded into a story about the Holocaust. (Yep, that's where the historical fiction part comes into play....
Tone
Call us crazy, but we seem to have noticed that novels about human genocide tend to be a little, well, dark. Books about the Holocaust feel heavy, generally speaking, and Briar Rose is no exception...
Writing Style
Briar Rose has a lot going on, shifting back and forth in time, amongst settings, and between the realms of fantasy and reality. It has a complex structure, even though it doesn't feel like a super...
What's Up With the Title?
Fun fact: Sleeping Beauty was known as "Briar Rose" in the collected fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Briar Rose just so happens to be Gemma's signature fairy tale in this novel. Except her versi...
What's Up With the Epigraph?
Both the oral and the literary forms of the fairy tale are grounded in history: they emanate from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and com...
What's Up With the Ending?
Do you believe in happy endings? You're in luck: the end of Briar Rose is about as happy as it gets, at least in terms of books about the Holocaust. Becca, hot off her success in cracking the case...
Tough-o-Meter
Briar Rose is an intricate book, but the good news is that it's not complicated or hard to follow. (Well, unless you count out having to sound out all those Polish names. So many consonants, so lit...
Plot Analysis
Local Grandma Repeats Bedtime Story 5 Million TimesHey, have you ever heard Grandma Gemma tell the one about Briar Rose? Yes? Well, too bad, because that's literally the only bedtime story Gemma se...
Trivia
Briar Rose has been banned—and burned!—in some places because one of the characters, Josef, is gay. (Source)
Awesome alert: Yolen's first book was about women pirates. The name? Pirates in Pett...
Steaminess Rating
Adolf Hitler ain't exactly known for bringing sexy back, so if you're looking for something racy, you might want to avoid novels about the Holocaust. In the modern part of the story, our girl Becca...
Allusions
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (2.6)Harlan Ellison (8.51)William Shakespeare, The Tempest (16.59)Robin McKinley, Beauty (novel) (16.97)Dante (25.2)Goethe (25.7)Schiller (25.7)Arthur Rimbaud...