 Hello everyone, welcome, I'm Philip Magnus, and this is not going to be one of my superbly edited book videos, as much as it's going to be a short discussion of Briar Rose by Jane Yolen. This book is not so much a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, even though plenty of people might try and tell you that it is. What Jane Yolen does here is she uses the story of Sleeping Beauty as a framing device that allows the author to create a hard aking tale attributed in fact to the horrors of the Holocaust. This novel is Yolen's attempt to contribute as far as her considerable talents allow her to making certain that we, all of us, all of humanity, never forget the horrors of the Holocaust that Nazism unleashed upon the world. Let's read the blurb, shall we? Ever since she was a child, Rebecca has been enchanted by her grandmother Jemez's stories about Briar Rose, but a promise Rebecca makes to her dying grandmother will lead her on a remarkable journey to uncover the truth of Jemez's astonishing claim. I am Briar Rose, a journey that will lead her to inspeakable brutality and horror, but also to redemption and hope. So you see, the story of Briar Rose, of Sleeping Beauty, is the framing device that lets us in on a mystery, but not the kind of mystery you'll read in any cheap airport thriller. The mystery at the heart of Briar Rose will likely be familiar to many of you. It seeks to answer such questions as where does my family come from? Who was this person who meant the entire world to me? The only fantastic element you will discover in this entire book is the survival of one young woman where no women survive in the Nazi execution camp of Chelmno in Poland. And I can promise you there is no way of a magic want to make any of the horrors, any of the brutalities seem any less real. No, the accent is on bringing this horror of the Holocaust, of the world war, into the form of making certain that we never forget it. A lot of this is done only once we get two thirds into the novel. Jolin deploys a story within the story. This one told not by Gemma's granddaughter Rebecca, but by Jacob, who is himself a pole from a wealthy, vaguely aristocratic Christian family, well educated and a member of the intelligentsia in the 1930s who chose to make Berlin his home before everything turned into a living hell. Someone who was comfortable enough in his privilege to think that the events what was going on with the Jews and the Gypsies and Jehovah's Witnesses and Communists would simply pass him by that they would not come for him regardless of his sexuality, which of course eventually happens. It is for his sexual preferences that Joseph is dragged into a concentration camp, the Sackenhausen labor camp as it was called, and I will read you the quote now. If you could ask Joseph Patoki to describe himself before he entered Sackenhausen, he would have said I'm a pole educated in Cambridge, a poet and playwright, a member of the minor aristocracy, a man of literate tastes, master of five languages, Polish, German, English, French and Italian and a gourmet cook. He would never have mentioned sexual preferences, there was no one's business but his own, besides he was quite aware of family honor which demanded an heir, an abstract concept he was prepared to deal with in the future. After Sackenhausen he would have said I'm a fag, not gay, there was nothing gay about being a homosexual in that place, nothing sexual either, like the other men he lost all desire for anything but staying alive, the option of rehabilitation was tricky. If a knight in a brothel proved one could not perform with a prostitute, one would be castrated. Joseph preferred to take his chances with the beatings and torches. It is this brutal honesty with which Jane Yolen describes her fictionalized account of the brutalities and the trivialized, and I speak here in the sense that these horrors were trivialized by the Nazis, not by Jane Yolen, that you can expect to come face to face with in this last third of the novel, in this story within the story. And so I loved following along with Becker's own chasing down of the mystery of her grandmother, it is this last third in many ways that is the most important one, far harder to read certainly. Before I read Joseph's story I would have described this as a book that you couldn't put down, after I read it, and as I read it in fact until completion, it is a book that you will need to put down now and again. It is a remarkable novel and an important one and it recalled to my mind my 14 or was it 16-year-old self reading the booktive by Marcus Youssef and coming face to face with horrible reality of the Second World War again and again, and that is one of the values of fiction after all, it allows us to examine and to empathize with great horrors when done right, when done correctly, when done with compassion and understanding and without flinching away from the terrible things that took place. It is a book of value and you should read it. Thanks for watching.