Sep 07 2009
The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman - a review
I haven’t ever read a book by Alice Hoffman before. I’m not quite sure why - she’s fairly well known and pretty well respected. Anyways, I decided to pick this one up because the story sounded really interesting and pretty unique. Some might even have thought the premise odd and that’s why I picked it up.
This book is about a solitary librarian from New Jersey whose name we never learn and whose favorite book is a book about different ways to commit suicide. At age 8, she and her older brother are orphaned after she wishes that her mother were dead as her mother is leaving to go out for her birthday. Her further wishes also bring nothing but pain - she wishes that she is struck by lightening and she is, causing her life to change forever. Not only does her body change (her heart becomes arrhythmic), but she can feel a storm coming hours before there is any sign of it and she becomes colorblind - she can no longer see shades of red. Fire is ice - reds are shades of gray or white. Absolutely frosty. Her fascination with death, always morbid, becomes even more of an obsession and even more morbid. Her title of the Ice Queen is surprisingly appropriate.
Her obsession with death leads her to Lazarus Jones, so named because he was struck by lightening and died and then rose from the dead forty minutes later. In him, she finds her soul mate and her polar opposite - where everything she touches turns cold, everything he turns blisters with heat and burns. In order for them to be intimate, they must have sex in a full bathtub.
Hoffman’s book was beautiful. Somehow, using absolutely sparse, spare language, she takes on redemption, death and love. Somehow, Hoffman manages to stuff so much into less then 300 pages. Her characters leave me breathless. There is so much that each character learns and there is so much to each character, that the reader can spend hours, days and weeks with these characters and not get bored. Hoffman’s narrative voice is unpretentious - it’s almost as if you’re sitting in a room with the narrator taking her oral history because her prose flows that smoothly and believably. I left certain parts just feeling lonely and sad for the characters in the book.
If I had my way, I would have spent an entire day on my couch just reading this novel because it was powerful, gripping and beautiful.
Book 63/100
