Book Review: The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman

Overall Rating:

Release Date: 3rd January 2006
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Genre: Adult Commercial Fiction
Pages: 211
Buy the Book: Amazon, IndieBound

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.

I absolutely adored this book! The opening scene is so poetic and tragic that it kept me traversing into the next, more bitter scenes in the book. Hoffman’s wry, sparse style is at times so romantic in contrast with the sardonic, death-obsessed narrator, that the overall effect is very charming.

This book is definitely a fairy-tale for adults, dripping with symbols, clues and meanings that it will have you pondering for days afterward. The wonderful way Hoffman has death transform, as though it is a tangible story or character arc in itself, is well-written and a pleasure to read. From the tragic opening death, the burdened main character, obsessed with the myriad of ways to die while struggling to find a reason to live, the vicious nature of death when carried in a lightning bolt, and finally the poetic way that death touches the lives of the people left behind and knits them together—Hoffman creates a wonderful, adult mythology in a wry, clever novel that leaves nothing wanting.

Characters: 5/5
Dialogue: 4/5
Writing: 5/5
Plot: 4/5
Style: 5/5
Opening: 5/5
Ending: 5/5

“Be careful what you wish for. I know that for a fact. Wishes are brutal, unforgiving things. They burn your tongue the moment they’re spoken and you can never take them back. They bruise and bake and come back to haunt you.”

“. . . there was another, hidden side to me. My realest self. The one who remembered how the ice fell down, piece by bitter piece. The one who dreamed of cold, silver hearts. A devotee of death.”

“I should have been embarrassed; there was so much about sex between us. I wondered how it would be if we didn’t need ice, water, all that cold. If given half the chance, we would never stop; maybe we’d grind each other into ashes, into dust, burning hot, bloodred.”