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Reading Guide Discussion Questions 1. Why do you think Maguire chose to set his version of CINDERELLA in seventeenth-century Holland? Could it be set elsewhere? 2. Were you surprised by the story's narrator? 3. Beauty or brains - which would you choose? 4. 'What no one tells the young is to be careful of their childhoods. The memories from those days are the most compelling paintings in the mind - to which, with nostalgia or dread, you must ever return.' Discuss. 5. Is Clara's beauty a curse or a blessing? 6. On p. 13 Margarethe says, 'The English have a morbid fear of the foreigner among them!' Is this true? 7. P. 20 'Who can say what purpose beauty serves.' Does beauty need to have a purpose? How does Maguire depict beauty in CONFESSIONS OF AN UGLY STEPSISTER? 8. Has the ending of CONFESSIONS OF AN UGLY STEPSISTER for ever subverted the concept of a fairy tale 'happily ever after'? 9. The closing sentence of CONFESSIONS OF AN UGLY STEPSISTER: '.the faces of the children would need to be painted in a blur, the way all children's faces truly are. For they blur as they run; they blur as they grow and change so fast; and they blur to keep us from loving them too deeply, for their protection, and also for ours.' What does Maguire mean by this? 10. Discuss the politics of Haarlem. Further Reading WICKED - Gregory Maguire
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