Finished it last night and loved it. I hadn''t read Maguire''s earlier book Wicked, but knew it was a fantasy. Confessions is not a fantasy, but a straight up historical novel about a widow struggling to care for her daughters (one "slow" and massive, the other clever and plain) in seventeenth century Holland. No fairy godmothers, no pumpkin coaches but real people dealing with ambition, jealousy, betrayal, and the collapse of tulip futures. I write and read a lot of historical fiction - this book is up there in the top tier.