Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

If you enjoy a different take on classic fairy tails this is a good read. This is the third time I have read this book. Each time I do I pick up on a different plot twist. Of you enjoyed Maguire other books you will enjoy this one also.

This story was a moderately entertaining twist on the classic cinderella but after Wicked I felt it was a letdown. However, the compelling last chapter was a true winner. I am glad that I read it but if you have to choose Wicked is definitely better.

This book was so enjoyable. It makes you think without making your head hurt. It really keeps you on your toes. The ending is both surprising and wonderful. I can't wait to read it again and will be looking forward to more from this very talented author.

Young Iris, along with her mother and sister have fled from England to Holland to live with her grandfather. When they arrive they find that her grandfather has died and they have nowhere to stay. The story follows the family as they try to survive and prosper in their new homeland.

This is a wonderful story with intelligent, complex characters interwoven with historic themes of the 1600s including portrait artistry and the Dutch Tulip bust. The story is a take on the Cinderella fairy tale, but it can stand on its own merit. Iris and Ruth are compared to the wicked, homely stepsisters and eventually they become the sisters of Clara, their hauntingly beautiful new stepsister. The twist is that Iris and Ruth are hardly wicked and Clara is not poor or particularly kind.

Iris' mother, Margarethe, is an unforgettable character. She has the strength of will to survive the toughest of situations. She brings her two daughters to Holland under desperate circumstances and is relentless in her efforts to secure a comfortable living for them all. However this same strong will helps her to achieve wealth at any cost. Her calculating, cold-hearted, manipulations make her an odious character but it is hard not to admire her determination and love for her two daughters. The story is told primarily from Iris' point of view and you see her grow from the fanciful perceptions of a child to a practical understanding of the realities of her family and those around her. Great read.

Let me start with I strongly disliked Wicked. I'm not a Gregory Maguire fan. I picked up Confessions at a local bookstore at a significant discount. Some of the best money I've spent on a book in a long time. The lyrical writing paints a fantastical story with just enough reality to make me believe in the possibility. The Cinderella tale is cleverly hidden in the story of a mom and two sisters who fled England for the Netherlands when their father died unexpectedly. Each element of the tradition is set into the action with the freshest spin I've seen to date. I highly recommend this read if you enjoy fairy tale retellings.

After reading this book I decided that Gregory Maguire was my favorite author.

This story it written so that's its easy to read with a very good flow, but while it's easy to read that doesn't mean the plot line is simple. The plot line is not that of a YA book, its written maturely, and without the unbelievable characters that have a very one sided personality.

At the end of the book I was left with a giant gapping hole in my heart. In a good way because I was so desperate to keep reading that I almost started it over again. Unfortunately I had other reading obligations at the time.

I absolutely adore the twists from the original Fairytale. Especially because it does not present Cinderella as perfect, it does show her as beautiful but she's also spiteful. The story is told from the step sisters point of view. (Clara) Whom I adore as a character, because she's clever and plain looking, and very caring for her sister Ruth and for Cinderella. She's a true heroin who puts others above herself but still wants what she wants and is willing to fight for it.

This book is a nice retelling of the Cinderella story, obviously from the point of view of one of the stepsisters, who are really not nearly as bad as you'd think.

Iris, her mentally slow sister Ruth, and their mother Margarethe flee from an angry mob who killed Iris and Ruth's father in England. They hop a ship to Holland, hoping to be taken in by Margarethe's father. Once they arrive, though, they find the old man has died years before and they are left without family or support.

Margarethe is a schemer, though, a clever woman who will do anything she needs to do in order to make sure her daughters are fed. She manages to get them work with an artist--she cooks and keeps house, Ruth gathers flowers for the Master to paint, and Iris is recruited as a model, although by all accounts she is plain to look at and will never be a beauty.

Soon the family is swept up into the lives of the van den Meer family, a wealthy family in town who have commissioned the Master to do a portrait of their daughter, Clara, holding a bouquet of tulips. Clara is Iris' age and beautiful in almost a supernatural way, and her father hopes that her portrait with the tulips will help him in his new business of tulip importation, which has suddenly become all the rage among the upper-class in Holland.

Much of the rest of this story is predictable, of course--the marriage that turns Clara into the stepsister of Iris and Ruth, the ball the beautiful girl is not expected to attend, the prince who is dazzled by the anonymous lady. Through this narrative, though, even these expected plot twists are made to seem new and exciting.

I really liked the way this story came together, and the way that the stepsisters were turned into well-rounded characters with stories of their own. I would have liked to have a clearer idea of what had happened with Clara, though. This story toyed with the idea of Clara as a changeling, but her disappearance as a child and what was done to her during this time was never satisfactorily explained.

Confessions is another in the series of books that Gregory Maguire writes where he takes a well known story and twists it around. This time, he takes on the story of Cindarella. We all know about the ugly stepsisters, the evil mother-in-law, the glass slipper and all the magical mice of Disney fame. What the author does here is add more to the story and twist it around in terms of its viewpoints and explains "what really happened".

I liked this story much more than I liked "Wicked" (His rendition of The Wizard of Oz) because he twists the storyline into a believable context. For one, he takes out all the magical elements - so, if you are looking for the Fairy Godmother, the mice, the pumpkin, and so on, you will not find them. Instead, he places the story in the context the Netherlands at the time of Rembrandt and the Tulip Bulb Bubble. The stepsisters and the mother in law are real people - they are a dutch family that had emigrated to England but come back home when the English husband dies. They are poor and destitute and searching for any assistance. The mother works as a housekeeper for a painter who tries to rival Rembrandt in his efforts. For one particular commission, the painter decides to paint one of the ugly sisters as a counterpoint to the beautiful tulips that are all the rage at that time.

The story is told from the viewpoint of this sister. She tells the story of the family as it escaped from England and settles in the Dutch town. She tells how her mother begs for work and how they get ensconced in the painter's household.

The painting is a success and actually leads to the family moving from the painter's house to the house of the wealthy merchant who commissioned it. This family has the wealthy wife who runs the household who gets pregnant and needs help as well as a mysterious teenaged daughter who is beautiful beyond belief but who refuses to set foot outside of the house. The three young girls get to know each other and play with each other including some trips outside the walls of the house during which we find out that there is some terrible reason why Clara (the beautiful one) does not leave the house.

Then, one day, something goes terribly wrong with the matron's pregnancy and both she and the baby die. This is not unusual in those days, nor is it unusual that soon thereafter the merchant marries the mother of the two sisters. So, now the family situation we now is set up. So, what makes the father disappear?

Mr. Maguire's answer is to have the merchant speculating on Tulip bulbs at exactly the wrong time and end up losing all of his fortune - throwing the merchant into a deep depression which has him locking himself up in a bedroom, mostly comatose.

As the house is slowly denuded of all of its possessions to pay off the creditors, the dowager Queen of France comes to town and announces that she would like a ball to introduce the local young women to a young male relative of hers. Of course the whole town is thrown into a tizzy and everyone who has eligible young women in their households are competing to go. This household, with three eligible women, is definitely invited and they all make plans to go - although Clara is very reluctant. Ultimately, the sister who is telling the story manages to convince her beautiful step-sister to come to the ball by setting up an elaborate scheme that will make sure no one recognizes her involving a separate coach ride, and an outfit that is borrowed but including white slippers made from silk so that, in the right light, they look like they are made of glass (another element explained).

The night of the ball comes, all the young women are paraded in front of the young man, and the sister telling the story manages to hold his attention for a few minutes due to her smarts and ability to converse in English as well as Dutch. Then, in comes Cindarella - I mean Clara and takes over. She is the most beautiful of the young women there by a large margin and immediately captivates the prince. She and the prince repair to a private room and are not seen again while the ball continues. One thing leads to another and a fire breaks out which has everyone scurrying out of the mansion and into the countryside. The girls reconvene at their home in the morning after having walked back from the mansion to discover that one of Clara's slippers is missing.

The prince comes looking for the young woman who lost the slipper and discovers Cindarella, takes her off to marry, and they live happily ever after. Right?

Well, almost. There is a final chapter in the book which is written by the other sister. The one who was considered dumb throughout the whole book. This chapter ties all the loose ends together and tells the end of the story. It talks about all three sister's lives and early deaths and their family situations. It clears up any remaining mysteries and puts a final twist into the story in the way in which this silent sister saw the things that went on.

By telling the story in this way, and tying it so carefully to plausible events, this book is a great read. The reader can clearly see how the fairy tale elements could come together from a story that is really the lives of some common people. The magic is in the way it is perceived rather than the way people really behaved. That is another aspect of what makes this book such a great read - it is a plausible story that is believable. There is only one element that I was unhappy with - the mother's role as an evil person is unduly enlarged when she reveals some of her misdeeds to her daughter. There was really no point in adding this plot device as without it we simply have a very determined woman trying to make her way in the world while supporting her daughters. Adding criminal elements to the mother's actions makes them more bizarre than is warranted.

So, I recommend you read this book and enjoy it as I did. It is a fun retelling of the story of Cindarella that twists it into a view of what life might have been like in 17th century Holland!

Margarethe Fisher is the mother of two young girls. Ruth, an heavyset and ungainly girl with the wit of a small child and Iris, the younger of the two, unattractive, quiet, and always the keeper of her mute older sister. When Margarethe's husband dies in England, the result of a mass murder from a business practice gone awry, she must flee to the country of her birth with her two daughters to escape the teeming mass of angry villagers. In Haarlem, Holland Margarethe attempts to solicit charity by trading in on her families good name, but she is met with ill success. Eventually, she is granted charity from a struggling religious iconographic artist and his young assistant who takes them in so he can paint Iris for his patrons. It is through the Master that the family meets Cornelius Van den Meer, a rich patron who lives with his wife, Henrika, and his young, isolated daughter, Clara. Van den Meer becomes interested in Iris, thinking her a suitable playmate for his daughter, one that might teach Clara the English language, so he uproots Margarethe and her daughters to his home and installs them there for this purpose.

The story is a take on the classic Cinderella faerie tale. All of these characters merge well into the Cinderella story, and identifying the similarities between the original and the contemporary retelling was something I reveled in. Maguire has cleverly expanded on the roots of the story by setting it in Holland in the 1700's during the height of tulip madness. Maguire's skilled prose circulates around characters that seem ideal for the time period. Van den Meer is an investor enmeshed in the risky business of the tulip market. Master Schoonmaker is a disenchanted oil painter disappointed with the recent secularization of the art world. Even Margarethe seems to be plucked from the past, with her ambitious schemes and her refusal to acknowledge things unseemly for a lady. And then there is Clara to consider, who takes on the role of the famed cinder girl. For the better part of the book she is a mewling, spoiled, self-centered child who has been cosseted to the point that she refuses to set foot out of doors. But due to circumstance that feed well into the advancement of the plot she takes on a much more similar role to the kitchen maid and house keeper we have all come to know as Cinderella. The story is largely told from the perspective of Iris, "the ugly stepsister" in the book. It follows her through this intricately embellished world of Holland and concentrates much of the time in the studio of Master Schoonmaker and elaborates on her impressions of the events that parallel the Cinderella happenstances. Fraught with intrigue and mysticism this is a book that will delight readers of fiction and faerie tale alike.

Gregory Maguire is brilliant. Since before I can remember, I have loved anything "princess". I've watched all the Disney movies and just loved them. My love for the movies consists of love for these characters that get lost in love and enjoy their happy endings. Who doesn't want a happy ending? What I love about Maguire's writing is that he brings a realistic side to all these stories. I absolutely loved Wicked. It was the first of Maguire's that I read before seeing it on Broadway. Followed by Son of a Witch to find out what happens next. This is only the 3rd of his books that I have read and I have loved it equally.

I love that he can take these characters and put "real' life into them. Hearing the Cinderella story told by her ugly step sister Iris, it's fun to have a different point of view. I ended up having a love/love relationship with just about every character introduced in this story. I will always love the classic way the stories are told, but will love these just as much. I am looking forward to reading more from this author.

Over all I give this book a B+

The Cinderella story gets a unique literary treatment in this haunting novel. The murder of her father sends homely Iris, her mother Margarethe, and her dull-witted sister on a midnight exodus from seventeenth-century England to Margarethe's native Holland. In Holland, the resourceful Margarethe is soon married to a wealthy widower, and Iris finds herself stepsister to the unnaturally beautiful but melancholy Clara.

Contemptuous of her own beauty, Clara shuns society, taking refuge amid the cinders of the family hearth. When Margarethe goads Clara's father into a foolhardy investment that results in his ruin, slow starvation seems the family's likely fate. But once again, Iris's mother has the perfect plan. "Give me room to cast my eel spear," she urges, "and let follow what may."

Will this familiar tale be told in the expected way, we might wonder, or will the author surprise us with unexpected character reversals and plot twists?

Neither -- and both. Maguire's narrative holds with tradition while taking us beneath the surface of this cut-and-dried morality tale to show us real people possessed of grievous flaws, redeeming virtues, and compelling motivations. While some of them are wondrously transformed, others are revealed as bearing little resemblance to what they first seemed.

This retelling is neatly slotted with actual period events, and cleverly glosses over the implausible elements of the fairy tale. There is a glass slipper, sort of. There really is a prince who seeks a wife from amongst commoners, and he has a credible reason for doing so. There's even a fairy godmother, though she appears in a rather unlikely guise.

Maguire's uncluttered yet richly evocative prose makes Confessions an effortless read. His insightful characterizations and his inventive rendering of a tale with which we're all familiar make it a worthwhile and rewarding read as well.

For years I have enjoyed the adult content of all the major Disney studio releases. Aimed at a juvenile demographic, they, in humor, cater to adults. Such was my delight in reading Gregory Maguire's novel, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister.
Imagine trying to take the urban legend of the couple in the car that hear of an escaped maniac with a hook hand on the loose in the area, and drive away, only to find a bloody hook lodged in one of the door handles, and re-tell this story, told ad nauseum, in a completely original vein. That is just what the author has accomplished with this book, given readers a completely original 'bloody hook,' in the form of Cinderella.
Maguire's Cinderella is a tale of beauty, of ugliness, of betrayal, of despair. No longer is Cinderella the shy, misunderstood, but ever-so-beautiful young girl, put upon by an unmotivated stepmother. Cinderella, or Clara, as she is called in this tale, is headstrong, independent, fearful of the world, a disbeliever of its wonders, a subscriber to dark tales of imps and changelings.
The aforementioned Stepmother, Margarethe, flees England with her two ungainly, awkward daughters in tow. Iris and Ruth are submitted to the worst cruelty, the affirmation from their own mother that they are plain, ugly, and ultimately unprofitable to their mother, and a burden, as they cannot ever hope to marry. Margarethe schemes and connives her way into a wealthy household, and into the Master's marriage bed following the death of Clara's mother in childbirth.
But all is still not as it seems. Clara, doused in beauty unparalleled in Holland, has no interest in the world, no concept of the power her beauty entitles her to. Margarethe, intent on protecting her interests in the guise of concern for her daughters, all but pimps Clara out, hoping to cash in on her looks, and therefore secure her own station, when it is put in jeopardy.
Although the story plays out according to the time-honored tradition of the Cinderella fable, there are many secrets to be revealed in this recounting of all-too-familiar lore. This isn't your childhood bedtime Cinderella, nor is it the property of Disney any longer, this Cinderella belongs solely to the adept imagination of Gregory Maguire.
Rich in the landscape of 17th-century Holland, dark in its revelations that 'extreme beauty is an affliction', and haunting in its study of the curse of plainness, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister is a wonderful, original piece.

It is easy enough to describe Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister as a retelling of the Cinderella story. But that is too simple. Maguire makes the story his own by changing voice and main character. More a historic novel in form and tone than a fairytale the story is no longer the traditional one. To add a ring of truth he sprinkles in actual events, such as the conversion to Calvinism and the collapse of the tulip-bulb market in Holland in the early Sixteenth century. Fairytales were meant to instruct and to entertain. If Maguire had only reshaped Cinderella into a historic novel his removal of fairy godmothers and magic would leave a rather hollow story. But he doesn't. His characters mull over issues such as the role of art and beauty and their affects on society and the individual; extreme beauty can be as isolating as extreme ugliness. The discussion of these topics is made less daunting by retaining enough echoes of the original fairytale that the story remains familiar and comfortable.

There is also a beauty to the language of Confessions. One aspect of appreciating the work of any artist is recognition of his unique contribution to form and technique i.e. his transcendence of it. But another aspect, closely allied to form and technique, is how his art touches the heart and soul of its viewers. Maguire is a masterful writer whose use of language is beautiful beyond simple communication. He has written a novel that can be appreciated for its beauty of language, its compelling story, and its thought provoking questions - each aspect informs the others but never interferes.

I admit to being uneasy at first with Maguire's making of the Cinderella fairytale into a more mundane historic fiction. But further reflection led me to accept that it should be judged in its own right. Maguire is a talented writer and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister has found a permanent place on my crowded bookshelves.

Wow! Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister is moving, poignant drama filled with magic, adventure, wit and subtlety. What a fantastic read!
It begins with an old crone listening to children in the street reciting the fairy tale CINDERELLA, and realizing that they must be speaking of *her* family, but the story has been bastardized, butchered beyond recognition. This is how it "really" happened, from the point of view of the crone, one of the two so-called wicked step sisters. And what an absolute joy to read. Stripping the fairy-tale of it's magic mice and fairy godmothers allows for true issues of self-worth to be addressed, along with a good dose of romance and wit.
The story is cleverly plotted, coming up with mundane explanations for the magic in the fairy-tale, while telling the unique tale of the compassionate step-sister who is instrumental in her two sisters' development. The tension within the story is palpable and utterly credible. Iris, an awkward teen, fears her looks and the scary magic she perceives lurking around her in her new home and her new country. Clara's confrontation with "Wicked Step Mother "Margarethe is the story's driving conflict, and all the reasons behind the Margarethe's behavior are rivetingly explained.
Iris has a good, true heart, but must overcome her low esteem and fight her mother's tyranny to find love. Clara, too must come to terms with her looks, which she deems just as much a curse as Iris' ugliness. Her search for courage and competence after being raised as a porcelain doll is a valuable lesson to put across to readers without being preachy.
Margarethe is a formidable villain to every character in the story, capable of taking them all on with cunning. The writing is quick, intelligent and humorous and filled with menace, at all the right moments. Yum yum yum. Can't wait to read Wicked. Bravo!

Man, was I wrong. Maguire has crafted a spectacularly complex and complicated novel from the brief fairy tale with which most of us have been familiar since childhood--it all seemed so simple then. . . .

What Maguire does so effectively is makes the previously simple story so darned complicated. . . . What we have always believed or assumed turns out not to be true or exactly as we once thought. What had been so horribly wrong now seems to be almost right (or at least less wrong. . .). What we thought was so heroic and right now seems to be shady and suspect, at best. The lines between good and bad, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, fact and fiction--they all seem terribly blurred, causing the thoughtful reader to reconsider his/her entire belief system and preconceived notions about life (OK, that's a bit extreme, but it is unsettling. . .).

I love the history Maguire gives us in UGLY STEPSISTER. Rather than just filling in the details from the story we already know, he goes back to the Brothers Grimm, takes their sketchy details (the ones Disney left out altogether), and turns them into a fairly complicated storyline, ending up somewhere around where most of think that Cinderella's story begins. By that time, our world has been turned on its side, and we no longer know quite what to think of the whole situation. Maguire changes nothing essential from Grimm's or Disney's stories, just enhances, adds, and recasts.

It is very easy to take a complicated story and make it simple, with pat explanations and formulaic answers. What is much more difficult--and what Maguire has done virtually to perfection--is take a fairly simple story and make it so much more complicated, complex, and significant. I bought this book and sat down and read it that very weekend--usually it takes me a few months (or years) to get a book to the "top of the list." WICKED is at the top of the list for my next significant block of time. I can't wait, and that speaks volumes about Maguire's work!

(I gave WICKED four stars--STEPSISTER is better, in my opinion. I have yet to read LOST and MIRROR, MIRROR--maybe next summer. . . .)

This, Maguire's second retelling of a "fairy tale" (the first is "Wicked"), is fairy tale only on the surface. Maguire takes this as an opportunity to write a well-turned, compelling rumination on beauty and ugliness, sacrifice and survival, generosity and selfishness. Maguire does not expand on a fantastical world, as he did with Baum's Oz in "Wicked;" instead, he places the fairy tale in pedestrian 17th-century Holland, most notable for its emerging bourgeios merchant-class and its accumulation of truly great painters. The story gets told mostly from the point of view of one of the "ugly" stepsisters, Iris, a girl brought to Holland from England by her mother, who can only think of survival and schemes herself into murder and bankruptcy. Cinderella herself is a girl of such surpassing physical beauty that she perceives it as a curse, and of her own volition becomes the cinder-girl when her mother dies in childbirth. The details are filled in from a completely human point of view, and there are ample opportunities for Maguire to explore the subjective nature of beauty, both physical and spiritual, perimarily in conversations between Iris, her mother, and a minor Dutch painter who becomes her mentor. Maguire pays attention to the relationships of the sisters and step-sisters, the (step)mother and daughters and step-daughter, without resorting to stereotypes. The two "ugly" sisters, Iris and Ruth, in particular form their own bonds with Clara, the Cinderella, and in the end Clara redeems the "curse" of her physical beauty through generosity. The only sour note in the book is the epilogue, written from Ruth's perspective and presenting her at odds with her portrayal in the rest of the book. Barbara Kingsolver used this device to much greater effect in "Poisonwood Bible", and that because she integrated the narrative of the "retarded" family member into the narrative as a whole. In general, however, this is a provocative book and an enjoyable one.

As he did in his excellent novel, "Wicked," Maguire once again takes a familiar fairy tale and rearranges our preconceived notions on a story that has been handed down from generation to generation. This time, Maguire uses the tale of Cinderella as a backdrop to the eternal question, "is beauty really in the eye of the beholder and who decides what is truly beautiful?"
The story takes place in Holland and revolves mainly around one of Cinderella's stepsisters, Iris. Maguire develops a "back-story" that discloses the odd circumstances in which the young girls first become acquaintances and then family. The family is plagued with misfortune primarily due to the overbearing mentality of Iris' mother, Margarethe. She is driven to extremes to try and satisfy her own cravings for wealth and importance in the community.
Iris, who has an eye for art, is portrayed as the only family member capable of of "keeping things together." Her maternal sister, Ruth, is awkward and has the mind of a child. As for Cinderella, she is a spoiled rich girl that has never learned how to care for herself and has much growing up to do.
In Maguire's tale, the step sisters are not the evil villains they've been made out to be and Cinderella, or Clara as she is called, is not the perfect "catch" even though her bewitching beauty is unchallenged. The mother, on the other hand, does have an evil persona to her character. However, Maguire offers insights into her personality and experiences that have made her that way.
This is an excellent book. My short description doesn't really do it any justice. Although I didn't like it as much as "Wicked," it was still a very worthwhile read.

Gregory Maguire spellbinds in this Cinderella story where nothing is what it seems. Even better than his debut novel, Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister is set in Haarlem, Holland (Netherlands) in the 1630's. Haarlem is known even today mostly for its flowers and flower related festivals. In Confessions, the tulip mania and subsequent crash that rocked the Netherlands in the 1630's play a large part. An even larger role is taken by oil painting. During this time, referred to as the Golden Age of Holland, Flemish masters vied for commissions of patrons, each one hoping to be recognized as great. Rembrandt was one such artist.

Maguire chose well to set his tale in the Netherlands. Unlike Wicked, which is set in a fantasy country, the harsh yet captivating winter scenery of Confession's Haarlem includes strange windmills, gray skies, and icy rivers. Anyone who has ever read the beloved story of Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates will instantly be transported to Holland.

The story is told from the P.O.V. of one of "Cinderella's" ugly stepsisters. All the familiar characters are here: the widower father, the stepmother, the prince, the other stepsister, and of course, Cinderella. Her name in the book is Clara. Iris is an intelligent, kind-hearted, but undeniably ugly girl who befriends her strange stepsister. Clara is convinced she is a changeling. Her recounting of her experience will give the reader chills. Maguire is a master of mingling magic with reality, to produce eerie mystery. Iris tries to coax her out of her room and to see more of the world. This leads to more than either of them bargained for.

This book is a real treat for any man or woman. It is for adults, not children.

What begins as a very slow start to an unconventional telling of the Cinderella story eventually wins the reader over into a novel that you can't wait to pick up. Iris and her sister Ruth are born in England. Their mother yanks them from their homeland in the middle of the night and returns to her hometown in Holland to escape from the evils that purport to haunt their family. The remainder of the novel portrays their arrival in Holland and subsequent stay from Iris's point of view. The family ultimately winds up in the home of Cornelius and Henrika van den Meers, parents of Clara, the most beautiful child anyone has ever laid eyes on. Thus begins the story of how Iris meets "Cinderella" the belle of the ball.

Maguire continues his unconventional fairytale storytelling with Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. This perspective on a beloved story is fascinating and the reader cannot help but appreciate his imagination and point of view. This particular novel, however, gets off to a very slow start. Because the entire premise of the book is the unusual spin on the classic tale, the reader spends almost the first half of the book thinking, come on, when do we get to the part of the story that I am familiar with? However, once we get there we are not disappointed because by then, we are in love with the new characters that have been introduced, and fascinated by the way that Maguire weaves them into a story that we thought we knew. This book is extremely fun and light, and will not leave the reader disappointed.

I came across this book accidentally in a bookstore, and despite the cliché, I was interested in reading the book because of the cover. I wasn't disappointed. This is a wonderful retelling of a very hackneyed story. The "Cinderella" story has been replayed by authors and Hollywood so many times that the story, in my opinion, hit a slump. However, Maguire revives the tale with this witty retelling.

The story revolves around Clara (the beautiful "Cinderella"), Iris and Ruth (the "Ugly Stepsisters"), and Margarethe (the "Evil Stepmother"). However, these characterizations are hardly complex enough for the characters. Clara may be beautiful but it is also a curse upon her. She can be very stubborn, heartless, and spoiled at times, but still, the reader always feels a bit of sympathy for her. Usually Cinderella is always portrayed as being so kind and loving, and Maguire presents a more realistic depiction of her. Ruth and Iris are extremely well-developed and shatter most of our expectations about beauty and stupidity. The tyrannical stepmother still embodies the cliché somewhat, but her motivations are derived more from self-preservation for herself and for her daughters than for an earnest desire to cause suffering.

The story is interesting and the writing is very detailed. The descriptions of Holland during the time added credibility and realism to the story. However, the plot seemed to drag at times, which is the reason I am giving this 4 stars in stead of 5. For the most part, the slow plot allowed Maguire to completely develop the complexities of the characters and their relationships, but I think the book could have been shorted by like 50 pages. It is a fast read, if at times a little dull. I definitely recommend it, and I look forward to reading other novels by Maguire. 4 Stars.

My daughter had been suggesting I read this book for years. I think I avoided it because somewhere deep down I've always sympathized with the ugly stepsisters. I couldn't help but wonder what their lives would have been like with a different mother. The cover of this book gave me the impression that the stepsisters' story would be ugly indeed. And in some ways it is. The beginning of this book is harsh and dark, something out of a grim Dickens novel. In fact, nothing in this story rings of Fairy Tales. No Fairy Godmothers, magic pumpkins, and certainly no birds singing happy songs to anyone.(As in the movie.) The mother is a miserable woman who has no problem making her daughter's lives hell. The other characters are drawn in such a way that even though their lives were over-the-top awful, they seem real, and I genuinely cared about them. I especially liked the two painters, their predicaments and their problems.
One of the aspects I enjoyed was the fact that you know you have an unreliable narrator. Iris is certainly seeing, and telling, events through her own slanted, self-centered viewpoint. Trying to search out the truths in the story made it even more fascinating. I recommend this book, but it's not for children or those who can't read harsh, sometimes grim, material. For all that, it was still a good read, and I'll be thinking about the characters for some time.

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister is far and away the best book I have read in a long time, and it's a more-than-worthy successor to Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

Gregory Maguire established himself as an inventive reshaper of fairy tales and fantasy stories when he wrote Wicked in 1995; however, L. Frank Baum had already shaped the world of Oz, so Maguire had to maintain many aspects of it to keep Wicked credible and authentic. He definitely accomplished this with creativity to spare, but certain aspects of the world were just hard to reimagine, so ingrained were they into pop culture.

That's where Confessions surpassed Wicked for me: the seamless aplomb with which Maguire sculpts the Fisher family's world through our plucky and clever Iris, who I very much admired as the unlikely heroine. The added wiggle room allowed Maguire's imagination to do the heavy lifting instead of having to rely on so many conventions of a particular story, and the result is a mysterious, plausible, heart-rending world built on intriguing, blurred dichotomies (good/evil, beautiful/ugly, desire/obligation, childhood/adulthood, reality/fantasy) that are compellingly intertwined. If you like vivid, imaginative prose and fairy tales that are all grown up, definitely pick this one up.

Reading Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister was a little like participating in a scavenger hunt. The familiar details of the Cinderella story are hidden--sometimes tucked away, barely recognizable, sometimes out in the open but in different dress--waiting for the reader to discover.
Like Wicked, his other novel, Maguire packs Confessions with layers of meaning. It's a discourse on the nature and value of beauty; the relationships between women and between women and men; the nature of a changeling; and what it means to "jump," as Margarethe refers to self-preservation.
I also liked the way Clara was portrayed. In this version, she's not relegated to the status of servant by her tyrannical stepmother, she chooses it for herself--her own method of jumping. Additionally, while the relationships between the Fisher sisters and Clara are not always sisterly, they're dynamic relationships that reflect the caprices, virtues, and prejudices of real people, not the flat relationships portrayed in most versions of the Cinderella story.
My biggest complaint about the novel is a pretty minor one. I won't ruin the surprise, but I was disappointed in the way Maguire handled the Epilogue. It didn't seem to fit with the rest of the novel; it's as it he wrote it simply for the value of a "twist."
Regardless, readers interested in retellings of popular fairy tales, Dutch culture and history, or simply literary fiction will like this novel. Recommended.

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister is a beautifully crafted tale of longing and desire and of finding charity in the least expected of places, told by one of the great storytellers of our time.

Iris is our unlikely heroine, the ugly daughter of a scheming & willful mother, who finds herself living in a world of magic & mystery as she struggles to love, live and grow in 17th century Holland. Kind-hearted, fiercly intelligent, slight of frame and possessing no outward beauty of her own, Iris develops an artist's eye for "looking & seeing" the world in ways that implant in her heart a deep longing for things she often cannot have, not the least of which is the attention of a handsome young man named Caspar, whom she meets at her Master's art studio. Iris has two sisters; Ruth who is just as unnatractive as she is minus Iris's obvious talents and the breathtaking but sheltered & spoiled Clara, who is really her stepsister. The captivating tale is an intimate look into the lives of the three girls, the way they weave in & out of each other's destinies and of the intersesting people they meet along the way.

Gregory Maguire has an uncanny gift for getting the reader right into the head of his main characters, so we can feel their pain, longing, joy, hope and heartbreak as if it were our own, and there is no exception here. His spellbinding literary prose adds to the overall beauty of the story told and creates a sense of otherworldiness that is hard to put into words. I found myself completely lost in this tale, which is the best way to read a story right?

This novel is one of my favorite stories of all time. I don't want to ruin the story so I won't say much more about the plot. But it's not giving too much away to say that you can expect the immensely bittersweet ending that is a hallmark of any Maguire novel. Some people cannot stand this Maguire trademark, as is eveident in many of the reviews, but I adore it! Its like the ending you LOVE to hate! He always leaves you wanting more which forces you to use your own imagination, which in the end is what great art does best. This novel is AMAZING, BRILLIANT, BEAUTIFUL, heart-wrenching & heart-warming at the same time and truly a work of art; a gift given to us by a very talanted and beloved artist.