Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

754 Words4 Pages
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister is a novel about a beautiful and spoiled child named Clara, who is not allowed outside of her home for a strange reason. The evil stepmother, Margarethe and her two daughters, Ruth and Iris has came into Clara’s life. Ruth is mute and assumed to be handicapped and yet she is pretty smart. Iris is the younger sister, though both of them aren’t beautiful. Margarethe’s family is falling and breaking apart, she had no one to stay with until Luykas Schoonmaker or the “master” takes the threes in. Iris falls in love with his assistant, Caspar, and finds that she has a good eye for painting. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister basically tells the story of Cinderella through the perspective of Clara’s step sister, Iris, who is her only friend. The girls struggle to keep their family from poverty and grow up in a world where they are judged by their appearance. Characters in this story are motivated by both circumstances and desires. This story takes the traditional fairy tale of Cinderella and conveys the plot into a different point of views. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister takes the fairy tale you know and places human vulnerabilities and emotions into the mix. There are reasons that these characters developed the way that they do. For example the “evil” stepmother, Margarethe’s actions performs are inherently evil, and rude towards her stepdaughter, but because she is a widow struggling to ensure that she and her two daughters survive. This novel challenges the fairy tale idea that the most physically appealing character has the most interesting personality and has the most interesting story to tell. Clara is kept hidden in her home first by her mother and later by herself. As a child, she was kidnapped and held for some reasons, but she believed she was captured by water-spirits and turned into a changeling. After her mother dies,
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