Amazon.com--Even at his most playful, Robert Coover still manages to pull off inventive and important writing. His books, including The Public Burning and Spanking the Maid, seduce you first with a sly humor and irreverent wit, then wallop you with a metafictional hammer. Briar Rose is no different; in fact, it may be his best work yet. In what is ostensibly a retake of the Sleeping Beauty fable, Coover takes us deep inside the dreams of the sleeping princess and into the forest of briars that trap the dogged prince trying to rescue her. But what emerges as the novel cuts back and forth between the princess's dreams and the prince's struggles is a fusion of sex and storytelling. The rhythm of the story picks up to an erotic pace that is at once exhilarating and claustrophobic. It's a beautiful transition, and even after the book is closed, you feel the story spinning on and on.
The New York Times Book Review, Michael Gorra-- . . . rich and intricate . . . Mr. Coover undresses the metaphor and strips bare the story's body of sexual meaning. . . . Mr. Coover treats his material with what looks like irreverence but is really a kind of logic about the princess's corporeal existence.
From Kirkus Reviews , December 15, 1996--A tour de force that rings an astonishing series of changes on the familiar fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. The prolific Coover (John's Wife, p. 155, etc.) has always been fascinated with the sheer playful possibilities of fiction, and with the many kinds of intentions that a seemingly straightforward narrative conceals. In this brief, dense work, he explores--in the contrasting voices of Sleeping Beauty and her resolute Prince as he fights his way to her bedchamber to awaken her from a deathly enchanted sleep--a remarkable number of interpretative possibilities lying just below the surface of the tale. The series of brief meditations by the two that compose the book suggest at various times that the story is really about the powers of the imagination (the two lovers-to-be have distinct ideas about what each represents to the other), about the masculine need to create a lovely, will-less female object of beauty, about the need of women to resist (by sleep, if nothing else) the kinds of male yearnings projected onto them, about the nature of desire itself (``You are that flame,'' Beauty is told, ``flickering like a burning fever in the hearts of men, consuming them with desire, bewitching them with your radiant and mysterious allure''), or about the anarchic power of the storytelling drive (``The awful powers of enchantment'') to take over a tale, to reassemble itself in a ``dangerous and inviolate'' form in defiance of an author's conscious intentions. The tale is also an amusing parody of literary scholarship, of its willingness to force polemical meanings onto a work of the imagination. All of this is rendered in a precise, vigorous, droll prose. There's no doubt that Coover can do almost anything he wants. But his reluctance to finally settle for any culminating metaphor makes this unique work seem more of a collection of masterful, cerebral turns than a living, persuasive tale. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.