Friday, January 6, 2012  FFB: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister
- Gregory Maguire  Long before Gregory Maguire's first book
Wicked became a huge hit on Broadway (3388 performances and
still going strong) he was still a fairly unknown writer
concocting some imaginative reworkings of familiar fairy tales
and children's books. Now with a blockbuster Broadway musical
fashioned from his book Maguire has gained the kind of attention
his books should have given more than a decade ago. His second
book - Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (1999) - still remains
my favorite of all his work and ought to be as well known as
Wicked.  But I fear it has been overshadowed and is long
forgotten due to the musical and the sequels Maguire has written
as part of his re-imagined Oz.  Just when you think there have
been too many re-imagined versions of well-known fairy tales
along comes one that brilliantly reinvents perhaps the archetype
of all fairy tales. Maguire, who with Wicked wrote a
subversively political tale about Baum's