Briar Rose Themes

As the story begins, poor Becca is trying to come to terms with the death of her grandmother Gemma. By the time she travels to Poland, she comes face to face with mortality on a much larger scale:...

If you think about it, Gemma had at least three families: whoever her family was before the Holocaust, her wartime family of the partisans who rescued her, and the family she established after she...

The Polish farm community in Massachusetts where Becca lives is predominantly Catholic. Here's a fun fact: so is Poland itself, which is nearly 90 percent Catholic to this day.Strains of faith, and...

There are so many aliases and cases of confused identity in Briar Rose that you'd be forgiven for mistaking it for a spy novel. (Though, admittedly, Grandma Gemma seems like a pretty weak spy name....

Briar Rose toots its own horn a little bit in that it's a story about the value of storytelling. Stories are the way that its characters relate to one another. Becca grows up hearing Gemma's fairy...

When we think of memories, often we think of happy times: a wedding, first steps, a treasured birthday present, maybe a first kiss (preferably not involving CPR). What happens when your memories ar...

The strategy of almost everyone in this novel is to turn their backs when things get difficult. Gemma wants to avoid talking about the past. Becca's family wants to avoid facing what happened to th...

Briar Rose is in some ways an attempt to correct people's stereotypes and misconceptions about World War II. It makes a point, for instance, of demonstrating that not all of the victims of the war...