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Title: Briar Rose

Author: Anna Barry

Narrator: Anne Dover

Format: Unabridged

Length: 15 hrs and 48 mins

Language: English

Release date: 04-25-12

Publisher: Soundings

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Bel Huntley married too young. If Miles could only give her the daughter she longs for after four sons, she might yet rediscover her love for him.

While Bel dreams of a daughter, Jean Carter prays for a son. Jack, her husband, pours scorn on Jeans failure to provide him with an heir.

When Bel finally gives birth to a daughter, Jean becomes suspicious. Could there have been something between Bel and her husband, who always fathers daughters? In her jealous grief, Jean invokes an old curse.

She never expects it to work, but from that day onwards disaster stalks their valley. Filled with remorse, Jean longs to undo the damage - before she has a future generations blood on her hands.

Members Reviews:

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I loved every minute of Briar Rose by Jane Oliver. It was one of those books that you did not want to put down until you read the whole book.

A sweet tale

This is an awesomely twisted and sweet take on the fairy tale. A little modern YA, a lot of fantasy. Cleverly done.

Kinda Boring

It was a little on the boring side, predictable in most parts of the book. But it was something to read for sure.

Awesome idea, could have been executed better...

I loved the Demon Trappers series by Oliver and was super excited to read this fairy tale retelling by Oliver. I have had this book for quite some time and was so excited to finally have time to read it. Honestly I was a bit disappointed.

Briar Rose is sick of the small town in Georgia that she is growing up in. On her sixteenth birthday her ex is spreading false rumors about what they did in the car one night and the guy of her dreams tries to take advantage of her too. To put it lightly, Briar is having a bad sixteenth birthday. Things only get worse when Briarâs parents tell her that she is cursed and doomed to die on her sixteenth birthday. However, Briar doesnât die...she goes to sleep and wakes up in the middle of the most twisted and dark fairy tale ever. Now she has to figure out how to break the curse before she is stuck there forever...or dies.

There are some really cool ideas in here, it's kind of a fairy tale within a fairy tale. While I loved the idea behind the story I just felt like parts were really awkward. The dialogue between characters felt forced and I had a lot of trouble staying engaged with the story.

I just felt like this was such a neat idea and it could have been so much more with more descriptive writing, more natural sounding dialogue, and characters that weren't so hard to engage with.

I also disliked the whole "pairing" off of all of the characters. While two of our leads (Briar and Joshua) do have a good foundation for a relationship, the other two couples do not. They both have a serious case of insta-love and in both cases it's a very unlikely insta-love. The whole thing just felt so forced.

So, enough complaining...onto what I loved. I loved the idea of a evil queen who infects a kingdom with vicious metal beasts, I loved some of the fight scenes. I loved how metal was used as both a talisman to ward off evil and as something evil that infected people. I also enjoyed the story behind the dark queen and why she was infecting the realm with metal. I enjoyed the idea of a fairy tale curse that sends a girl into a sort of cursed fairy tale.

The story wraps up well but overall I was a bit disappointed in the quality of the writing.

Overall an okay fairy tale retelling that had some interesting elements but was overall somewhat disappointing.