The Looking Glass Wars, Frank Beddor

OH MY GOSH! Cannot remember the last time I was that caught up in a book. Could not put it down.

The plot goes along with Alice in Wonderland--the story being that "Alice" is based on the stories told by Alyss Heart, the rightful queen of Wonderland who was exiled at age 7 when her evil Aunt Redd killed her parents and stole the throne. Alyss must return to Wonderland with the help of her friends Hatter Madigan the milliner assassin and her childhood love Dodge Anders, who I am now not so secretly in love with. . . . The book has elements of 1984, and an incredibly imaginative re-interpretation of Wonderland. One of my new favorite books!

Snow White and Rose Red, Patricia C. Wrede

As I was searching the children's section for Briar Rose, I stumbled upon a few books I had not read by Patricia C. Wrede. Wrede writes fun young adult books, full of magic, confusion, and spunky heroines. Being in the mood for fun and not too much thought, I picked up another book in the Fairy Tale series of Briar Rose, Snow White and Red Rose.

Snow White and Red Rose is not the same fairy tale as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. So I didn't actually know the fairy tale of the book. Wrede interspersed bits of the fairy tale with her story, so that I read it slowly throughout the novel, but I think part of the joy of the story was lost on me.

The novel is set in Elizabethan England, in a world that combines traditional idea of Faerie with a historical fear of witchcraft. Two girls and their mother get inadvertently involved in a vortex of human wizardry and Faerie drama. Wrede uses rather Shakespearean language (this is the only place I've read "an" to mean "if" outside of the Bard), which jarred with her accessible prose at first. Once I got past it, I enjoyed the novel, from an "I want something simple and engrossing to take my mind off the housing hunt" perspective.

Briar Rose, Jane Yolen

On recommendation from a roommate and fellow Vincentian volunteer.

This book brings together the stories of the Holocaust and Sleeping Beauty, one of my favorite fairy tales. I mostly liked the fairy tale as a child because I had a Sleeping Beauty book with the most beautiful illustrations. I sped through Jane Yolen's Briar Rose in one evening, from 4pm to 10pm, despite the fact that I had assumed it would keep me reading for a few days.

Despite the fact that it is in the Fairy Tale series, a series of books by different authors meant to bring fairy tales to life in the modern world. It is the story of a girl on a quest for her own history and her grandmother's identity, an identity which Yolen reveals through the story of Sleeping Beauty. Any Holocaust story is bound to be tragic, and this novel is no exception. Yet it keeps from being oppressive. I'm fairly certain that I've read excerpts from it somewhere, because portions of it were so familiar that I already knew the names of places and events, but I know I hadn't seen some of the plotlines before.

The library housed it with Juvenile Fiction, where it probably fits best, but it doesn't need to be a children's book. Which, after all, is part of the goal of the Fairy Tale series.