Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire

[lightreads]

Fiction. A Cinderella retelling in the perspective of an ugly stepsister, from the author of Wicked. Hmm. Okay, this book is just "not quite." Which I need to put in the proper scale -- the set-up is brilliant, as Maguire's generally are, and the follow-through is good, and the denouement is fine. But I didn't want fine. I wanted this book to walk up to me and knock me on my ass with a right hook to the gut. Instead it came up, dazzled me with some fancy footwork, and then asked me for a sedate waltz. Parts of this book are sheer genius -- the cleverness of the title which you don't realize until the very last page, the autistic ugly stepsister, the treatment of beauty in art and in life, Clara/Cinderella as a voluntary shut-in, the setting in sixteenth-century Holland, the reality of a prince searching for a wife. And the writing itself is outstanding, the sentence-by-sentence pace intricate and beautiful. But this book, which was excellent by the standards of fiction everywhere, fell just that tragic bit short of the extraordinary thing that it could have been, that feeling
when you read a book and it's as if the whole thing rings like a bell, the note perfect and clear and dazzling. And this sounded as if the author left his finger on the bell when he struck it, to over-extend the metaphor. I'm glad I read it, but I’m beginning to suspect this is Maguire's shortfall, and it makes me sad to see this beautifully conceived idea land in the realms of good and not blow-your-mind.