Briar Rose by Jane Yolen

Becca’s grandmother, called Gemma, has always loved to tell the tale of Sleeping Beauty, but the version she told Becca and her sisters is different than the original tale-only the princess ever wakes up, the prince disappears from the tale at the end, and the descriptions of the evil faery and the forest of brambles resemble more recent horrors than the old tale- and has always claimed that she herself is Sleeping Beauty, and on her deathbed, she asks Becca to find her prince. As Becca attempts to fulfill this last wish, she learns that even her mother wasn’t sure what Gemma’s real name was or where she was from, or who her father was, and that Gemma, a Jew, did not escape to America before the Holocaust, but only escaped near the end.

Like Elizabeth Marie Pope’s The Perilous Gard this is a book I read multiple times in high school, but Yolen’s book doesn’t hold up as well for me as Pope’s did, which actually improved with the years between readings. On the one hand, I’m pretty sure I got more out of this regarding the Holocaust than I did most lessons about it (and those lessons certainly didn’t cover the treatment of homosexuals in the Holocaust), and this likely helped create my interest in stories where the narrative revolved around the mystery of discovering the unusual truth about a seemingly common person who is not actually present throughout the text, but reading it now, I’m not particularly comfortable with Yolen’s use of the Holocaust, or the implication in her afterword that, by living in a town where there was a concentration or extermination camp, you cannot be a good person, even 50 years after the fact. Particularly 50 years later, when most citizens would have been children or not born yet when the crimes were committed. There’s also the fact that we never really get Gemma’s story, we just get a few details, and the bit of her story that we see is from someone else’s perspective. I suspect a large part of my rereads was hoping that I’d eventually see something there that I hadn’t before. (Another factor is that it kept making me think about how there’s apparently a law that all modern fiction with a Jewish lead must, in some way, revolve around the Holocaust, but I don’t know if that was as much of an issue in 1992.)

Dreaming Water by Gail Tsukiyama

Hana Maruyama is 38, but has the body of an 80-year-old thanks to Werner’s Syndrome, a genetic defect that causes rapid aging. Hana is almost entirely dependent on her mother, Cate, and the two live a very quiet, orderly life. Hana’s best friend, Laura, has not seen Hana in over ten years, despite repeated offers to visit with her two daughters, who are Hana’s goddaughters. On the verge of divorce, Laura decides to take matters into her own hands, determined to see Hana at least once more before Hana is robbed of her awareness.

The book is split between the present and Cate and Hana’s pasts, not only with their living with Werners, but also the experiences of Cate and her husband, Max, as a biracial couple in the 50s and 60s, and Hana and Laura’s youthful friendship. Tsukiyama’s writing, I think, is better suited for whimsical, if sad, takes on history, and so ends up somewhat stilted when dealing with the present. Very good, but I’m starting to wonder if I’ll like any other book of Tsukiyama’s as much as The Samurai’s Garden.