by Gregory Maguire
  HarperCollins ReganBooks, 1999
  ISBN 0060392827
  368 pages, $24

Unless it's written by Gregory Maguire, an Albany native and children’s book author turned novelist, who in his 1995 debut novel, Wicked, told the tale of the little girl who would grow up to become the Wicked Witch of the West. Critically well-received, Wicked made it immediately apparent that Maguire sees the world differently than most. To him, beauty is not always sweet innocence and ugliness is not always evil, jealous greed. And so it is with Maguire's second novel for adults, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister.

As the title suggests, Maguire has tackled a familiar fairy tale and made it his own. The story takes place in seventeenth-century Holland, where Dutch-born Margarethe Fisher arrives with her two plain (well, ugly) daughters after a somewhat mysterious flight from their home in England. Margarethe seeks refuge in her grandfather's home in Haarlem, only to find that he has died during her time abroad. Casting about quickly for a substitute haven, Margarethe establishes herself and her daughters as house servants to Luykas Schoonmaker, a portrait painter.

Here the story becomes that of Iris, the younger of Margarethe's daughters. Iris dutifully looks after her elder sister Ruth, a bumbling ox-like creature who can barely speak, while assisting her mother with the household chores. In the artist’s studio, however, several new worlds present themselves to Iris. She is fascinated by beauty, painting, and the art of looking at art. She is also fascinated by Caspar, Schoonmaker's young apprentice, and by the new country in which she finds herself. Taking Ruth in tow, Iris roams the countryside surrounding Haarlem, imagining imps and magic lurking behind every bush.

But is there really magic? This is where Confessions differs from Wicked, in which magic, although muted, was undeniably present. In Confessions, although Maguire constantly hints at magic and mystery, everything in the story can ultimately be explained in non-magical terms – if the reader wishes to do so. In a way, this results in a more successful commentary on the nature of evil and its motivations than Wicked provides, because in Confessions, it is impossible to use curses and spells and prophecies as an excuse for evil. Instead, Maguire simply asks, See how an almost ordinary story of love and marriage and a mother's not-so-unusual attempts at social-climbing can be turned, hundreds of years later, into a children’s fairy tale of black and white, good and evil?

The story unfolds as Margarethe finds her family a better position in the household of Heer van den Meer, a tulip investor whose beautiful daughter Clara finds beauty to be such a burden that she eventually chooses to work at the kitchen hearth and become a “Cindergirl.” Perhaps the story unfolds a bit slowly, but this isn’t a book for the impatient. Instead, it’s for the reader who wants to savor Maguire's descriptions and language, and the slow-building suspense as the fateful ball draws near. It’s for the reader who wants to ponder the questions Maguire raises, which are always open to the reader’s interpretation. Is Clara really a changeling, as she herself seems to believe, or was she simply kidnapped for ransom when a young child? When Margarethe insinuates herself into Clara's home, is she behaving any differently than would any widowed mother in the man’s world of the seventeenth century? The raising of such questions, as well as the remarkably sensual prose, bring to mind the fiction of Australian writer Janette Turner Hospital, although Hospital chooses far more contemporary settings for her work.

Ultimately, Maguire's real triumph is that he manages the impossible: he provides a wonderful surprise ending without changing the story of Cinderella. He successfully challenges the notions of good and evil, and demonstrates the ways in which people insist on applying such labels. In his words, "You might be born as the donkey-jawed Dame Handelaers or as dazzling Clara van den Meer, Young Woman with Tulips. How we try to pin the world between opposite extremes!"

While Maguire could almost certainly deconstruct and rebuild other fairy tales in an equally satisfying manner, it is almost to be hoped that he begins inventing worlds purely his own, because he has the kind of unusual imagination and talent for language that you don’t see every day.