And just when I thought this book would never end …
Review: The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman
*Be advised, some reviews may contain spoilers.*
GoodReads Book Description: 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. Eventually, he invites our heroine to move down to Florida, where he teaches at a university. Here, while trying to swat a fly, she is struck by lightning (the resulting neurological damage includes an inability to see the color red). 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 tale’s harsh mercies (e.g. 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.
Rating:
Recommended For: Anyone looking for a non-habit forming sleep aid.
My Review:For being such a short novel, this seemed like one of the longest books I’ve ever read. There are no short supply of characters in this story … but none of them were all that engaging. This is one of my biggest pet peeves in a book. The characters are such an integral part of the story. How do you get away with writing weak characters? Simple. You don’t. If you can’t even make your protagonist enjoyable, pack it in. It’s over. The narration was all over the place. One minute our nameless narrator is grief stricken with mourning over the mother she thinks she eliminated and the next she is caviling over what poor creature her villainous cat has slain. She’s so capricious, selfish, and incredibly whiny that she’s almost impossible to identify with (let alone root for). I was more interested in the damn cat than the narrator. The book bills itself as being about a cool and distant young woman whose life is altered forever by a lightning strike and the love affair with a mysterious stranger who has also survived a strike. But, because the book is everywhere and nowhere all at once, you barely explore any of this. The relationship between the narrator and her lover is not even discussed in any depth until a hundred or so pages in and even then, as quick as the flash of lightning that strikes our protagonist, the mystery is over and you’ve got another hundred pages to go. The rest of the book deals with the numerous side stories that have cropped up through the book. Since none of these story arcs are really developed, it felt like a chore to continue reading this book. Every possibility to progress this book in any sort of interesting way was just hopelessly squandered.
The book’s only saving grace is in the lovely and lyrical writing style of Alice Hoffman. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to save this book from the dismal one-star rating.
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