Summer Reading #3 and #4

It's the battle of the Jane Yolen novels.

Book #3: The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen

Now I don't know if anyone else remembers sitting in the seventh grade pod and watching this movie, but I do, and I think I liked the movie. The book ... not so much. The premise of the book is that you have a young Jewish girl from modern times who is sick and tired of hearing her relatives' stories about the Holocaust. Then somehow during Passover, she is magically transported back in time to the Holocaust and has to experience everything that her relatives did in the concentration camps. I just had a real issue with this. I understand that the author is trying to prove to young people that the memory of the Holocaust should be kept alive, but no family member who experienced concentration camps would ever wish that their grandchild would have to go experience it to understand what they went through. I much prefer Elie Wiesel's memoir Night to this book (though definitely an emotionally difficult read).

I give it:

Book #4: Briar Rose by Jane Yolen

This one, however, I do recommend. Briar Rose is an interesting mystery story about a young woman, Becca, whose grandmother dies and makes her promise that she'll figure out the truth about her past. All that Becca really knows about her grandmother is that she always told the story of Sleeping Beauty but in a different way than everyone else. The mystery ends up taking her on a trip to Poland to learn about an extermination camp there. There is a random gay character who at first I thought, "Really? An agenda in a book about the Holocaust?," but it ended up showing experiences of other people besides Jews who were persecuted. I found it very informative. Overall, the information in this book clearly shows that the author did her research way more than in The Devil's Arithmetic. This book was well-written and shows the reader that even if you have read a ton of books about the Holocaust, there is always new information out there, and the stories should never stop being told.

I give it: