Briar Rose is an allegory for the Holocaust experience i.e. Gemma's story acts as an effective vehicle for the telling of the entire narrative strand (real life). The harsh details of her survival are hidden in the magical fairytale, which softens the impact of reality for the reader. This for instance is seen through the segmentation of the novel into 3 parts 'home', 'castle' and 'home again' where the audience feels safe and warm in the 'home' which speaks of family love e.t.c and then are shocked by the raw actuality seen in …show more content…
Jane Yolen, however makes assumptions that all the audience have lived a peaceful life away from war, as she has to tell this tale in a way that you decipher what has happened. She assumed that you as the reader know about WW2 as a distance from textbooks and classes. Yolen assumes audience is emotionally distant from war, that they are intelligent and mature enough that when we are 'Home again' all the things that she tells us through allegory are not lost, she makes the assumption that the audience are educated and empathetic enough that she is making a pun on the term 'happily ever after' There is no such thing as happily ever after but Yolen is saying that in order to be happier in the future we must take all the learnings emotional and historical from the horrors of the past to make a smarter and kinder humans in the future. These alongside the way in which Yolen represents ideas throughout the story line are the factor that make 'Briar Rose' a memorable