The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman

Alice Hoffman writes beautiful prose, and she writes a lot of it. The trouble is, sometimes that means books tend to feel like repeats of each other. I feel that The Ice Queen is somewhere in the middle. It’s similar to others she has written, but it doesn’t feel like a complete copy.

The Ice Queen tells the story of a solitary librarian who is obsessed with death. When she was eight years old, when it was night and ice was on the ground, she wished her mother dead. Her mother never comes home. She from then on she separated herself from everyone and everything, making up her life story into a fairy tale with a girl whose heart is frozen into a ball of ice. Later on, she loses her grandmother and ends up in Florida with her brother Ned. There she wishes to be struck by lightening, and her wish again comes true. From there she becomes obsessed with a man named Lazarus who was also struck by lightening. He is fire, constantly burning from within, while she is solid ice, constantly frozen. Their affair makes her life interesting for a while, and helps thaw her inner frozen heart. Later, circumstances help her wake up to life and turn her back on death.

The main character is never named, and it is appropriate. She is not a character you really have any sympathy for. The real characters that grab you only really show up at the end. Ned and his wife are those characters, and you only really see into their lives when the main character finally melts enough to see outside of her own self. If that is what Alice Hoffman wanted, then she was effective with her character development. Otherwise, she fails in developing any real characters you care about.

What really grabbed me in this book was a scene towards the end. The scene in California made me cry, and I am not completely sure it was just her writing, or if it was a little too close to home with events in my life lately. I could see the beauty of the scene, and it still makes my heart clench. I’d wade through all of those ice-cold pages to read that scene with fresh eyes again.

Overall, if you are a fan of her work, I’d recommend reading The Ice Queen. Otherwise, I’d point you to some of her better work, like The Probable Future, The River King, or Practical Magic.

Rating: 3 Purrs