I just finished reading Briar Rose by Jane Yolen, and oh my was that a powerful book.
it combined Sleeping Beauty with the Second World War in quite an amazing way. but as good as the book was parts of me wish I had waited and not read it while waiting for the kiddos at their school (which is my main reading time). when it came to the second half of the story, where they got into the Holocaust and everything that happened there, reading that bit by the playground felt a bit surreal. I was stuck in two different times and emotions at once, and those two were as far apart from each other as anything could ever be.

I know we should never ever be allowed to forget what happened, but reading the book brought me right back to the fieldtrip to Berlin and the concentration camp. and that in turn brought back the same feeling I had walking around there. a huge lump resides in my stomach and I don’t have much hope for the human kind when we prove time and time again that we can do these unspeakable evils. I wish someone could tell me that this is just temporary, that humans will evolve enough to never do the same mistakes again and I wish I could believe that.

maybe life is like they say in the book “It ends happily, you know, even though it’s awfully sad along the way.”