18. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire

Maguire, Gregory. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.

There are a number of ways that books show up on my lists. These include but are not limited to:

• I was supposed to read it for a class but didn't
• I read part of it once and feel I should finish it
• It's one of those cultural oddities of 'you should...if you are a serious writer' books (Candide, Metamorphosis, etc.)
  
• I read something else by that author that I liked
• Somebody told me I would like it
• I randomly picked it up at a bookstore because it looked interesting

Or, and this one is a facet of suddenly finding myself a lit teacher,

• All the kids are reading it, why are all the kids reading it? *paranoia*

So I find myself, even though I swore never again after Wicked, reading another Maguire fractured fairytale. Mostly because about four kids in my English classes are reading it. Out of a total of 23 kids, that's actually a pretty high percentage. So here I am going, oh god, what's it going to be this time? Sex? Drugs? Violence? It has to be something. In any case, generally expecting the worst and doubly expecting that I'm going to hate finding out what it is based on my experience with Wicked.

As it turns out my concerns were baseless and beyond that, I actually enjoyed reading Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. Color me chagrined. Maguire fixed most of the pacing issues that caused me such problems with Wicked and put together an alternate story for Cinderella that I found hard to put down. Maguire set in Holland during the midst of the tulip craze which was interesting to say the least.

All and all, a pleasent surprise.

Apparently the reason everyone was reading Confession was that the musical of Wicked was playing downtown at the Fox and the library ran out of copies of the book. *shrug* Life is nothing if not strange.