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berylbird's review against another edition
emotional
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
<b> “Crone has the born fiction writer’s ability to lay out a tightly bounded world and create large moral dramas within it. Her frequent subject, the mythology around white southern womanhood, may have passed from history along with pastel shirtwaist dresses and magnolia blossoms, but the idea still matters because its extensions of meaning are still with us—and Crone doesn’t spare us the ominous implications of the strained, dreadful beauty of those women and the culture that bound itself to the task of keeping them protected.” <b> From an article in <i> ‘Image,” >/i> magazine.
The tightly bounded world in ‘The Ice Garden’ is a small town in 1960s North Carolina; the world of ten-year-old Claire, our protagonist. When we first meet her, she’s standing outside the window of the hospital where her baby sister has just been born. She’s not allowed to go in because of her age, and her companion, Sidney, the McKenzie housemaid, isn’t allowed to go in because she’s a black woman. Claire’s father holds the newborn up at the window, but there’s no sign of Claire’s mother.
When Claire’s mother arrives home five days after the birth, it’s obvious that she’s not bonding with her newborn. She wants to lay abed and the 4am bottle that the baby requires sets off a muffled detonation between her parents audible to Claire each night. When Sidney cannot be persuaded to stay overnight, Aunt C is called for, and a camp for her is set up for Aunt C close by the nursery on the opposite side of the house. What must it be like when you’re ten and have never seen a baby cared for before? Claire admits to herself that Aunt C knows just what to do for Sweetie (Claire’s name for her baby sister), even though she never had children of her own.
This is an intense and harrowing narrative. I was at all times concerned for Sweetie’s welfare and Claire’s psychological state as she suffers emotional damage. The deftness with which Moira Crone shows Claire’s interior war all while showing us the reality that creates the turbulence is a marvel. At times, Claire seems too precocious, but mostly, Crone puts me there, in Claire’s mind, so that I only see and hear her, feel her emotions.
Mrs. McKenzie is unstable, mercurial. Although there may be postpartum depression, which can be accompanied by psychosis in extreme cases, there seems to be an underlying mental illness. She is acting in the same ways she did before her pregnancy. Her husband is besotted with his wife, putting her on a pedestal, and further harms her and his daughters by being completely oblivious. I wanted to wring his neck. Any sympathy I felt for him was quickly washed away by his neglect in the face of glaring problems.
Mrs McKenzie hails from Charleston and looks down her nose at her neighbors in the small town. Whether this is her personality or some paranoia related to mental illness, I could not ascertain. Claire is torn between loving and yearning for her beautiful, blonde mother, and just wanting her mother to behave. Mrs. McKenzie’s beauty is a consistent pivot point in the novel, as her husband and daughter circle her, enticed by the flame of her beauty, but also wary, for there is something “strained and dreadful” as well, something that may consume them.
Families are such precarious things right at the beginning. My work with couples as a nurse, teaching them about their new babies, and encouraging bonding predisposed me to be at the mercy of this story. I was highly involved from the first page. I loved the author’s prose and imagery, especially as the final movement leads to an ice storm and an unforgettable ending.
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