This is a moving, thoughtful novel with a terrible title. Yes, it's a retelling of Cinderella (purporting to be the real story), but instead of arguing that Cinderella is secretly a bitch and the stepsisters were the true heroines, it is a meditation on beauty, trauma, and survival.
In this sense it reminds me of Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis's retelling of the Psyche and Eros myth. They both deal with women who have an unearthly beauty and sisters who are labeled ugly, and they both refuse to portray any of the main female characters as villains. The stepmother in Maguire's book, the closest the story has to an antagonist, does monstrous things but is no monster; she is a mother hardened by adversity and struggling to provide security for herself and her daughters.
It's the youngest daughter, Iris, who narrates the story, and she's caught between childhood, and the fanciful stories she tells herself, and adulthood, when she must come to terms with the strictures placed on women. She is convinced she's ugly and expects nothing of her future until her mother begins working for a master painter. He and his assistant show her other ways to look at the world, and spark in her an appreciation of the power of art.
Which is no small thing in this world (Haarlem of the 1600s). The Master laments the Protestant, business-like Dutch and their failure to appreciate the profundity of religious art. He hides his paintings of the freaks and oddities of humanity, lest they cause too much outrage amongst the conventional. And his masterwork, a painting of the Cinderella character (Clara), is able to inspire love, lust, business deals, jealousy, and artistic despair.
Clara, meanwhile, wants nothing to do with her beauty, having been traumatized as a young child and then stifled by overprotective parents. She's not the obedient (and personality-less) girl of the original story, but simply another young woman who has been controlled and told what to do her whole life, and rebels in the only way she can.
There's an unnecessary "twist" at the end that causes us to reconsider what we have been told about a character, but it ultimately doesn't add anything to the narrative. Overall, though, I enjoyed this melancholy tale.
The advent of baseball season put
me in the mood for this, an account of the absurdist 1973-1975 Texas
Rangers team. When your team has no hope of hitting .500, you might as
well embrace the egotistical and talentless hitters, the pitcher who
deliberately shot himself in the hand, the other pitcher who called a press conference to
announce he just threw spitballs, the outfielder given a whistle to blow
because he couldn't remember to shout "I've got it!", the long-suffering manager with
no illusions, the greedy owner coming up with ridiculous schemes to
generate revenue, scarily blunt
groupies, and the booze. Oh my God, the booze.
Seasons in Hell was fun, but Ball Four is the superior book, and the original baseball "tell-all." Bouton is a former ML pitcher, and the book covers the year he spent pitching for the one-season Seattle Pilots (plus three addenda for each additional decade). Bouton's status as an insider and as a pretty smart and insightful guy result in a fascinating account of what baseball was like for the players in the years before free agency. Although a lot of the stories he relates are fairly tame by today's celebrity-scandal standards, the book was hugely controversial when it was released; management had invested a lot in the idea of baseball players as Wholesome American Heroes, and finding out that they were often underpaid and mistreated, used drugs, drank a lot, played jokes on each other, chased women, and cussed would result in fans abandoning baseball! (Ha.) Some of the players, too, weren't too happy with the exposure, although to Bouton's credit he is never mean-spirited or cruel to his fellow players.
Math + Baseball = Awesome. This is the story of how one general manager, Billy Beane of the Oakland A's, defied baseball's conventional wisdom by using sabermetrics to build the best baseball team on the cheap. It's a fascinating account of how some obscure but crucial baseball skills are completely undervalued, because people (agents, scouts, managers, owners) are too focused on flashy statistics like batting average and win/loss records. This book was especially enjoyable for me as a Red Sox fan, because at the end of the season depicted, 2002, Beane turns down an offer to be the GM of the Sox. Instead Theo Epstein took the job, determined to bringing sabermetrics to Fenway, and had