The novel’s Holocaust narrative is told by Josef, as he recounts his life and encounters with Gemma to Rebecca. She travels through Poland to search for traces of her grandmother’s life. There, she learns of a Polish man, Josef Potocki, who is somehow linked to Gemma.

Rebecca flies to Poland to find the site that was once Chelmno. She was placed in Chelmno concentration camp in a queue to be executed. She learns that Gemma was a survivor of the Holocaust who narrowly escaped death due to her Jewish identity.

Rebecca asks her friend Stan, an investigative journalist who works for a historical newspaper. Gemma’s youngest granddaughter, Rebecca Berlin, suspects that there is a real memory behind her grandmother’s bedtime story, which she has told countless times. The novel begins at home in Gemma’s Boston suburb just after the death of her grandmother. The third story, back in Massachusetts, unites the first and second. The first takes place at Gemma’s home in the present day and the second in World War II Poland at a concentration camp called Chelmno, or “the castle. In 1993, the novel was nominated for the Nebula Award, one of the highest honors in fiction. Gemma is a repeat storyteller, and the plot cycles back and forth through time as she recalls the story over many nights. Much of the story is told in fragments by an old woman named Gemma as she relays it to her three granddaughters during bedtime. A blend of the classic fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty (alternately Briar Rose), Jewish history, and Yolen’s own life, it was first published in the Fairy Tale Series curated by Terri Windling. (Sept.Briar Rose is a 1992 novel for young adults by American author Jane Yolen. She handles a difficult subject with finesse in a book that should be required reading for anyone who is tempted to dismiss fantasy as a frivolous genre. By interpolating Gemma's vivid and imaginative story into the larger narrative, Yolen has created an engrossing novel.

To discover the facts behind Gemma's story, Rebecca travels to Poland, the setting for the book's most engrossing scenes and its most interesting, best-developed characters. Rebecca Berlin, a young woman who has grown up hearing her grandmother Gemma tell an unusual and frightening version of the Sleeping Beauty legend, realizes when Gemma dies that the fairy tale offers one of the very few clues she has to her grandmother's past. Yolen takes the story of Briar Rose (commonly known as Sleeping Beauty) and links it to the Holocaust-a far-from-obvious connection that she makes perfectly convincing. This is one of the series's most ambitious efforts, and only a writer as good as Yolen ( Sister Light, Sister Dark ) could bring it off. Windling's Fairy Tale series has produced several excellent fantasy novels inspired by classic fairy tales.

Briar rose jane yolen summary