SOURCE: Upchurch, Michael. “Dreams and Nightmares: Robert Coover Probes the Disparities between Reality and Might-Have-Been.” Chicago Tribune Books (9 February 1997): 5.

In the following review of Briar Rose, Upchurch praises the novel, though notes that Coover's “manneristic flourishes and acrobatic syntax” will make the work inaccessible to some readers.

It's a truism that certain authors write their books with future film options in mind. With this sly new retelling of the Sleeping Beauty story, however, Robert Coover opens up another, quintessentially 1990s possibility for media rights. His Briar Rose seems custom-designed to make a nifty computer game.

This shouldn't come as a complete surprise. Coover (The Public Burning, Gerald's Party) teaches electronic and experimental fiction at Brown University, and of all our literary novelists, he has been the most vocal in championing hypertext fiction: computer texts in which readers, clicking away at their mouses (mice?), choose their own paths through...