Way back in 1999, I reviewed.

Jane Yolen's "Briar Rose" [0-812-55862-6].

which had been sent to me by a good friend. The tag on the front of the book says "The bright tale of Sleeping Beauty, the dark tale of the Holocaust, twined together in a story you will never forget": it's nice to see that, for once, the copywriter has actually read the book.

Harrowing in the extreme, it's the story of an American woman who becomes obsessed with chasing down her family's heritage in Holocaust Europe. Jane uses a sequence of flashbacks that take a while to get into, but turn out, as one would expect from an author of her stature, to be a very effective literary hook for the story. It certainly worked for me - I found that I had to take an "extended lunch break" to sit somewhere quiet and finish the last fifty pages at one go. Pick somewhere where the occasional tear won't cause too much embarrassment.

In my original review, I mentioned Jane Yolen's children's book, "The Devil's Arithmetic" (Puffin, now in tpb, 0-14-034535-3) Although I personally found it even more gruelling than Briar Rose, I'm not the prime target audience of the book so it didn't seem fair of me to review it. Instead, I'll let my young friend Ahren Thielker have his say:

"This was a really intense book! About halfway through, I wanted to stop reading because it was just Too Much! but then I thought, "I 've never had to stop reading a book, and I won't let this one get the better of me; I _will_ finish it!" that was the part where they were told they would get used to the camps, and the brick tower with the smoke coming out of the top....

"Let me start at the beginning:

"This book is about a girl named Hannah, and she is at the Passover seder with all her family. She doesn't want to be there; she's feeling sick of Remembering [all about the Holocaust]. When it's time to open the door for Elijah, she opens the door and finds herself in a small Polish village in 1942, right before village is taken to the [death] camps. She appears in a house with some strangers who keep calling her Chaya. She wonders how they came to know her Hebrew name! One of the strangers that she meets there at the house is going to be getting married the next day. When they process to the neighboring village where the wedding is to take place, they arrive to find a Nazi who tells them to get into a truck. Hannah is the only one who really understands what's happening.

"They are crammed all together in that back of the truck, where they ride for days without food or water. When they finally arrive at their final destination, many of them have died along the way. At the Camp, they must learn several German terms which will come in handy, because if they don't, they will die! Literally!

"This is a story of courage, survival and the value of friendship set in the horror of the Holocaust. It's a very heavy, intense book, but I do recommend it. It's Difficult, but Very Important, because we don't want to repeat the past."

Thanks, Ahren. Enough said. Buy the book.