Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: The Ice Queen, by Alice Hoffman

The Story: I know it’s strange, but I didn’t even realize until I went to write this review that during the whole course of the book, you never find out the name of the narrator. Hm. Weird.

Anyway, the narrator is a librarian in New Jersey and she’s kind of had a tough life.  She wished her mom dead when she was younger and that night, her mom died in a car accident.  Because of this, she is under the impression that a whole slew of things that have gone wrong are all on her shoulders.

One day, she wishes that she’d get struck by lightening.  Of course she gets struck within the day.  She lives, but has a ton of crazy responses, like being unable to see the color red.  Her brother is actually involved in a study of lightening strike victims and gets her hooked up with this group of people who have been through the same thing she has.  Through this group, she meets a guy who she really falls for. The rest of the story is her letting go and learning to love not only other people but herself.

What I Thought: I have read a couple other Alice Hoffman books (but not Practical Magic. Weird, right?) so I knew to go in expecting a little bit of magical realism.  That is not usually a genre that I go for, but it was fifty cents at a book sale so I decided to give it a go.

This is one of those books that I know I would have gotten more out of had I read it with a book club or talked to the author about it or something.  I felt pretty sure that there was symbolism/mythology/yadda yadda all over the place that I just wasn’t catching.  The color red? I thought that part was so cheesy and far fetched, but it had to have meant something, right?  Same with the mole.  The cathedral thing? If you haven’t read this, you have no idea what I’m talking about.  In fact, I have read it and I have no idea what I’m talking about… so… moving on.

I will give this to Alice Hoffman: she has a unique style.  Not only the magical realism bit, but also just her writing style.  I feel like she is one of the few authors that I could pick out by just a writing sample.  It’s lyrical without going over the top.  She kind of has this simple way of putting complex ideas that is really powerful.

The narrator is totally filled with self loathing and I kind of got what Alice Hoffman was going for with her character, but I don’t think that she ever really got there.  The problem, I think, was that she was painted as this really complex person, but then she was this lonely librarian who had a cat.  That’s not complex, that’s overdone.  So, it was weird for me.  I never got totally attached to her and in the end I didn’t really care what happened to her.  As you know, I’m all about characters and it’s hard for me to truly get into a novel if I can’t “feel” the characters.  That happened here, and it was too bad because the IDEA of this book was good.

Conclusion: If you are a big Alice Hoffman fan, I’d say read this just because. Don’t make this your first Alice Hoffman book though.  It’s only mediocre.