Purchased today at the Friends Of The Library sales. Reserving for a Diva!

I've heard wonderful reviews of this book. I love both fairy tale retellings and Holocaust stories -- I recently read and enjoyed The True Story of Hansel and Gretel and someone recommended this one to me. Thanks for sharing!
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From Publishers Weekly
Windling's Fairy Tale series has produced several excellent fantasy novels inspired by classic fairy tales. 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. 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. 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. 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. By interpolating Gemma's vivid and imaginative story into the larger narrative, Yolen has created an engrossing novel. 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.

This retelling of Sleeping Beauty (or Briar Rose) sets the story as the tale of a Holocaust survivor. The book is a semi-mystery as the story is slowly discovered in the present day by the granddaughter of the Holocaust survivor. After Grandma (Gemma) dies, her granddaughter traces Gemma's history back to Poland where she was rescued from an extermination camp. While perhaps this just the nature of a young adult novel, I found it hard to believe the granddaughter protagonist was 23--she seemed more like a teenager. She has an unsatisfying current budding relationship that goes nowhere and left me wishing it had been left out entirely. Still, the final story of Partisans in Poland was interesting and the overall pacing of the book was good. If recommend this for young adult readers, but don't really think it has crossover appeal to adult readers, particularly those with any knowledge of Holocaust stories as this has little to offer that is new.

Mailed to the February sweepstakes decoy.

Thank you, MsJo! I didn't realize I hadn't journaled this before. I just finished reading it and enjoyed it very much. It has been a long time since I read anything by Jane Yolen, and this book reminded me why I enjoyed her writing so much when I was young.

Now I am passing this along to AceofHearts, who also has it on her wishlist.

Thank you, MsJo! I didn't realize I hadn't journaled this before. I just finished reading it and enjoyed it very much. It has been a long time since I read anything by Jane Yolen, and this book reminded me why I enjoyed her writing so much when I was young.

Now I am passing this along to AceofHearts, who also has it on her wishlist.

received in the mail. Thanks!!

My mom, AceofHearts, passed away from breast cancer on September 17, 2013. Aside from being one of the best people I know, she was an avid reader and took immense pleasure in Bookcrossing, her book club, and reading many great books. Unfortunately she didn't get around to reading this book.

We had similar tastes in books and would share them whenever we read something we enjoyed. This book sounds interesting so I'm going to keep it to read.

I tried very hard to get through this. After about 130 pages I gave up. There were two main problems I had. The first is that the main character's family was incredibly annoying. The second was that the main character's grandmother had a modified version of Sleeping Beauty and this is supposed to be shared with the reader, spliced with the main character learning about her grandmother's history. I found that so little was shared of the fairy tale and in such a disjointed fashion that it was hard to follow. And yet the beginning of the tale was shared too many times. The writing style of this made no sense to me.

To the finder of this book: I hope you enjoy reading this book. Please keep it or set it free when you're done. If the book is of no interest to you, please release it into the wild for someone else to find and enjoy. I hope you will make a journal entry so its journey can be tracked and to let me know the book has been found. You can remain anonymous if you wish, but if you join BookCrossing, you are in for a great experience.