The Ice Queen

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Very eye-catching story, mainly if you like romantic love together with supernatural events. It is a sort of bitter-sweet book where you get to get involved with the characters' feelings.

Good book.

excellent book

This is a captivating modern fairytale about one woman's journey through tragedy and pain, towards truth, freedom and happiness. It opens with a little girl in a rage, standing on her porch making a terrible wish that her mother will die. When it comes true and she dies in a car accident that very night, the girl is consumed by an agonising pain and guilt that will haunt her into womanhood. To cope with everything she grows cold, burying herself in dark fairy stories and books on death, closing herself off from emotion and social contact even as she maintains her dependable image at the local library reference desk.Everything changes when she moves to Florida, where her brother is now a married meteorologist working at a university. One fateful day, she is struck by lightning as she stands by her window. Her heart is a shard of ice, her body ravaged and her vision altered so she sees only crystal white or dull grey in place of the colour red. Agreeing to participate in her brother's research on lightning survivors, she begins to understand herself in light of the others' stories. Renny has hands threaded with gold where the lightning branded him with his own jewellery. The Dragon, struck twice, can spit fire.And then she meets Lazarus Jones, a reclusive man who was struck by lightning and died for forty five minutes before inexplicably waking up in the morgue. He is her opposite, a man whose touch burns and whose breath is hot enough to set things on fire. Yet there is a spark of understanding between them and in their mutual need for human contact they begin a passionate and secretive love affair, the Ice Queen and the burning man. Thus, slowly, through their union and their gradual rehabilitation of mind and body, they find truth, peace and themselves. Finally the Ice Queen has thawed and can look outside of herself and her obsession with her past in time for a moving yet hopeful climax.Woven through with fairy stories, lightning myth and the chaos theory, this is a moving and compelling novel that is utterly unlike anything I have ever read before. It manages to be beautiful yet macabre, and the ideas are expressed in pure poetry. Although it occasionally veered into a kind of self-conscious disjointedness, I couldn't put it down and was thoroughly immersed in it from start to finish. Each of the characters are touched by magic, and Lazarus Jones is a particularly strong, sexy and brooding anti-hero for female readers! The book has gone straight to the top of my wish list and I think it will haunt me for a long time. I'll definitely be seeking out more Hoffman in the near future...

I read the reviews for this book and couldn't wait to read it. I had just finished a really good series and was at a loss what to read next so anticipated The Ice Queen would fill a void for some stranger than life fiction fix.The Ice Queen is strange it was but did it quench my thirst? No it didn't. The book starts with a young girl wishing her mother dead, which duly happens. The book goes on to tell the tale of the same young girl growing into a troubled young adult with the terrible burden of her mothers death.As my childhood was filled with the tales of Brothers Grimm and my teens spent wallowing in murky tales and black humour i was looking forward to a fairy story for grown ups with a dark edge. The Ice Queen just made me blue.I found the telling of the story jaded and without a natural flow. Often maudlin and inward thinking i felt like the book was more about the author than the story. As if the author was inviting me, as the reader, into her personal version of the world, rather than opening the story up to swallow me in and ignite my imagination.This book just wasn't for me. Normally i would attempt another of the authors stories as there are so many good reviews out there for her style of writing but in this case, i think life is too short. Bleak & disjointed.

I can’t believe I’ve never read any Alice Hoffman before! I picked this up because it looked like my kind of thing, and was immediately hooked. A short, quirky read in a whimsical, dark fairytale style, it follows a young woman traumatised and suffering from depression following the death of her mother and grandmother, who is then struck by lightning, and her quest to find love and meaning to thaw her heart of ice. It draws heavily on fairytale tropes; wishes coming true, returns from the dead, the association of human with animal life.The protagonist is not always likeable, but you feel her pain and despair, and even though the book is short, you clearly witness her character developing and maturing. The ending, unlike the happily ever after of a fairy tale, is both sad and hopeful, with themes of rebirth and the continuity of nature. I love modern retellings of fairy tales or books that incorporate fairytales in new ways. It helps if you’ve read Grimm’s Tales because then you’ll understand the references.It was also interesting reading about the effects of lightning strikes on humans, as it’s not something I’ve ever thought about before. Some of the effects on the body are bizarre.I’m definitely going to read more by this author.