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   Book Info

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Ice Queen  
Author: Alice Hoffman
ISBN: 0316058599
Format: Handover
Publish Date: June, 2005
 
     
     
   Book Review


A solitary New Jersey librarian whose favorite book is a guide to suicide methods is struck by lightning in Alice Hoffman's superb novel, The Ice Queen. Orphaned at the age of eight after angrily wishing she would never see her mother again, our heroine found herself frozen emotionally: "I was the child who stomped her feet and made a single wish and in so doing ended the whole world--my world, at any rate." Her brother Ned solved the pain of their mother's death by becoming a meteorologist: applying reason and logic to bad weather. After his sister's accident, he invites her to move down to Florida, where he teaches at a university, partly so that he can help care for her (the lightning strike has left her with neurological damage, including an inability to see the color red), and partly to enlist her for a study of victims of lightning strikes. Orlon County turns out to receive two thirds of all the lightning strikes in Florida each year, and our heroine soon becomes drawn into the mysteries of lightning: the withering of trees and landscape near a strike, the medical traumas and odd new abilities of victims, the myths of renewal. Although a recluse, she becomes fascinated by a legendary local farmer nicknamed Lazarus Jones, said to have beaten death after a lightning strike: to have seen the other side and come back. The burning match to her cool reserve--her personal unguided tour through Hades--Lazarus will prove to be the talisman that restores her to girlhood innocence and possibility.

Hoffman's story advances with a feline economy of language and movement--not a word spared for the color of the sky, unless the color of the sky factors into the narrative. Among the authors who have played with the fairy tales' harsh mercies (Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter), Hoffman has the closest understanding of the primal fears that drive the genre, and why, perhaps, we never outgrow fairy stories, but only learn to substitute dull, wholesome qualities like personal initiative or good timing for the elements that raise the hairs on our neck and send us scrambling for the light switch. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. "Be careful what you wish for. I know that for a fact. Wishes... burn your tongue the moment they're spoken and you can never take them back." Thus begins Hoffman's (Practical Magic; Here on Earth) stellar 18th novel about healing and transformation. As an eight-year-old, the unnamed narrator makes a terrible wish that comes true; remorseful for the next 30 years, she shuts down emotionally to become a self-proclaimed ice queen. Unlike her brother, Ned, who relies on logic, math and science to make sense of the world, the loner librarian fears the chaotic randomness of existence and is obsessed by death. Then lightning strikes, literally. In a flash, she's jolted out of her rut, noticing for the first time all that she's been taking for granted—even the color red, which after the strike she can no longer see: "How could I have been so stupid to ignore everything I'd had in my life? The color red alone was worth kingdoms." The novel turns sultry when the slowly melting ice queen seeks out reclusive Lazarus Jones, a fellow lightning survivor who came back to life after 40 minutes of death: "I wanted a man like that, one it was impossible to kill, who wouldn't flinch if you wished him dead." Blanketed in prose that has never been dreamier and gloriously vivid imagery, this life-affirming fable is ripe with Hoffman's trademark symbolism and magic, but with a steelier edge: "Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws." Both longtime fans and newcomers will relish it. Agent, Elaine Markson. 10-city author tour. (Apr. 4) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Over the course of writing her 18 beguiling novels, Hoffman has perfected her nique and vivifying blend of romance, magic, and redemption, a mode of storytelling she uses with great panache to link the workings of nature with the spectrum of human emotions. Here she draws on her key inspiration, fairy tales, and her fascination with how chaos theory makes the connection between, let's say, the flapping of a bat's wings and a young girl's anger at her mother. Ever since she was eight years old, Hoffman's narrator, a devoted reference librarian, has believed that her temper tantrum caused her mother's death. Her guilt turned her solitary, stoic, and somewhat misanthropic, and she envisions herself as an ice queen. Even after she is struck by lightning. As her damaged narrator reluctantly joins a lightning-strike-survivor support group, Hoffman dramatizes the bizarre effects experienced by real-life lightning strike survivors, and orchestrates a highly erotic and risky romance between the ice queen and a fellow survivor known as Lazarus, whose breath ignites paper. As Hoffman's spellbinding and wonderfully insightful tale unfurls, she pays charming tribute to librarians, revels in metaphors of hot and cold, and poetically explores the meaning of trust, the chemistry of healing, and the reach of love. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

The Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times calls Alice Hoffman "one of contemporary American literature's most satisfying and thoughtful practitioners."

Book Description
From the bestselling author of Practical Magic, a miraculous, enthralling tale of a woman who is struck by lightning, and finds her frozen heart is suddenly burning. Be careful what you wish for. A small town librarian lives a quiet life without much excitement. One day, she mutters an idle wish and, while standing in her house, is struck by lightning. But instead of ending her life, this cataclysmic event sparks it into a new beginning. She goes in search of Lazarus Jones, a fellow survivor who was struck dead, then simply got up and walked away. Perhaps this stranger who has seen death face to face can teach her to live without fear. When she finds him, he is her opposite, a burning man whose breath can boil water and whose touch scorches. As an obsessive love affair begins between them, both are forced to hide their most dangerous secrets--what turned one to ice and the other to fire. A magical story of passion, loss, and renewal, THE ICE QUEEN is Alice Hoffman at her electrifying best.

About the Author
Alice Hoffman is the bestselling author of 17 acclaimed novels, including Practical Magic, Here on Earth, The River King, Blue Diary, Illumination Night, Turtle Moon, Seventh Heaven, and At Risk. She lives outside Boston.




Ice Queen

FROM THE PUBLISHER

From the bestselling author of Practical Magic, a miraculous, enthralling tale of a woman who is struck by lightning, and finds her frozen heart is suddenly burning.

Be careful what you wish for. A small town librarian lives a quiet life without much excitement. One day, she mutters an idle wish and, while standing in her house, is struck by lightning. But instead of ending her life, this cataclysmic event sparks it into a new beginning.

She goes in search of Lazarus Jones, a fellow survivor who was struck dead, then simply got up and walked away. Perhaps this stranger who has seen death face to face can teach her to live without fear. When she finds him, he is her opposite, a burning man whose breath can boil water and whose touch scorches. As an obsessive love affair begins between them, both are forced to hide their most dangerous secrets--what turned one to ice and the other to fire.

A magical story of passion, loss, and renewal, The Ice Queen is Alice Hoffman at her electrifying best.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

Frozen in misery since age eight, when the mother she wished would disappear promptly obliged by dying in a car wreck, the thirtysomething unnamed narrator of Hoffman's hypnotic new novel has spent her life avoiding meaningful human contact. As a New Jersey reference librarian, she relentlessly pursues the details of death in all its countless causes while engaging in after-hours backseat trysting with a local cop. After settling near her brother in Florida, the narrator is struck by lightning. Now, with the color red stripped from her vision, she sees the ice that has surrounded her heart all these years. When she learns of a local legend named Lazarus Jones, dead for 40 minutes after his own strike, she feels compelled to track him down. Their affair ignites, literally, for Jones's aftereffects are so severe that touching him causes burns. Hoffman's genius allows the lovers to hang in suspended animation until the outside world intrudes, more threatening than the near-fatal electrical disruptions that have defined their lives. Less-skilled hands would have left readers awash in sticky metaphors of heat and ice. Have no such fear with the formidable Hoffman. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/04.]-Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The veteran, bestselling author (Blackbird House, 2004, etc.) takes risks-most of which pay off-in her dark tale of a woman literally struck by lightning. The unnamed narrator has been racked by guilt since she was eight, when she petulantly wished that her mother would disappear. Mom died in a car accident that very night, and the traumatized girl grows up into a quiet librarian with a violent interior life. Her preferred reading is the grimmest sort of fairy tale; she makes up one of her own about a girl who turns into ice so that "nothing could hurt her anymore." At the reference desk she specializes in information on ways to die, an expertise that leads her into a joyless sexual liaison with the local police chief. After the grandmother who raised them dies, the narrator's brother takes his severely depressed sister to Orlon, Fla., where he's a professor of meteorology. Peeved by his enthusiasm for the stormy weather en route, she wishes to be struck by lightning, and . . . you guessed it. The setup is schematic, and the gloomy narrator can be wearying, even when she embarks on a torrid affair with another lightning-strike survivor: Lazarus Jones, who's still so hot to the touch that they must have sex in water so he doesn't scorch her. But slowly, just as you're thinking you'll scream if you read another fairy-tale metaphor or gruesome description of the damage sustained by lightning victims, the narrator begins to be drawn out of her self-absorbed misery. Her brother and his wife are in desperate straits, Lazarus is not what he seems, and the shock of these discoveries jolts her into recognition that she cares for other people more than she's admitted. Despite what happened to hermother (which also proves to be not quite what it seemed), love is as necessary as breathing. And love "changed your whole world. Even when you didn't want it to." It takes a while to get to the beautiful closing pages, which give the narrator a happy ending she's more than earned, but this thickly textured, heavily metaphorical approach finally leads us to some genuine human emotion. Far from perfect, but Hoffman's more adventurous fans will appreciate this interesting effort. Author tour

     



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