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sue_reilly 's review for:
The Ice Queen
by Alice Hoffman
Read for Romance Book Club September 2020.
OK this was not a romance but I'm so glad I read it, I would never have picked up this book if I had thought it was literary fiction. It does have an HEA but romance is a small part of the book and that's not the center of the story. The writing is gorgeous and engrossing. I loved this book.
This book is about a woman who, as a young child, thinks she has wished her mother dead. At the very end of the book we discover that her mother killed herself. The narrator, who remains unnamed, is obsessed with death and fairy tales. She avoids becoming close with other people, except the cop who calls her at her reference desk job and asks questions about death and whom she bangs in his car in the parking lot occasionally. After her grandmother dies she moves to Florida to be near her brother, and is soon after struck by lightning. She joins a research study and becomes fascinated by other lightning strike victims who have died and returned to life, and befriends one man named Renny whose gold ring and watch melted into his skin. She starts sleeping with Lazarus, who died and returned to life and is now burning hot all the time to the point that they have to have sex in a tub full of icewater. As she grows close with Renny, she also discovers that her brother has pancreatic cancer and his wife is pregnant. Somehow this combination of events awakens attachment, love, and openness for the narrator. She flies with her brother to Monterey, CA to see monarch butterflies, which he has been dreaming of, and where he dies. Eventually she moves back to NJ and reunites with the cop, who has been extremely kind during her brother's illness.
This book is full of magical realism, metaphor, and symbolism, but it's not overwhelming.
My favorite thing is that Hoffman incorporates so much of the natural world, not just the lightning but orange groves and sawgrass and lots of small animals like bats, ants, butterflies, and moles.
"It was nothing I wanted. Nothing I cared about. But mine all the same. I held the mole up and looked into its blind face. And then I realized what love did. It changed your whole world. Even when you didn't want it to."
She learns about love from a mole!!! This gives me great happiness.
At the end, her brother Ned presents a paper entitled "Chaos Theory and Fairy Tales."
"Magic was real, that was his thesis. This thesis was at the very center of chaos theory-- if the tiniest of actions reverberated throughout the universe in invisible and unexpected ways, changing the weather and the climate, then anything was possible. The girl who sleeps for a hundred years does so because of a single choice to thread a needle. The golden ball that falls down the well rattles the world, changing everything. The bird that drops a feather, the butterfly that moves its wings, all of it drifts across the universe, through the woods, to the other side of the mountains. The dust you breathe in was once breathed out. The person you are, the weather around you, all of it is a spell you can't understand or explain."
CWs: suicide, cancer, parental death.
OK this was not a romance but I'm so glad I read it, I would never have picked up this book if I had thought it was literary fiction. It does have an HEA but romance is a small part of the book and that's not the center of the story. The writing is gorgeous and engrossing. I loved this book.
Spoiler
This book is about a woman who, as a young child, thinks she has wished her mother dead. At the very end of the book we discover that her mother killed herself. The narrator, who remains unnamed, is obsessed with death and fairy tales. She avoids becoming close with other people, except the cop who calls her at her reference desk job and asks questions about death and whom she bangs in his car in the parking lot occasionally. After her grandmother dies she moves to Florida to be near her brother, and is soon after struck by lightning. She joins a research study and becomes fascinated by other lightning strike victims who have died and returned to life, and befriends one man named Renny whose gold ring and watch melted into his skin. She starts sleeping with Lazarus, who died and returned to life and is now burning hot all the time to the point that they have to have sex in a tub full of icewater. As she grows close with Renny, she also discovers that her brother has pancreatic cancer and his wife is pregnant. Somehow this combination of events awakens attachment, love, and openness for the narrator. She flies with her brother to Monterey, CA to see monarch butterflies, which he has been dreaming of, and where he dies. Eventually she moves back to NJ and reunites with the cop, who has been extremely kind during her brother's illness.
This book is full of magical realism, metaphor, and symbolism, but it's not overwhelming.
My favorite thing is that Hoffman incorporates so much of the natural world, not just the lightning but orange groves and sawgrass and lots of small animals like bats, ants, butterflies, and moles.
"It was nothing I wanted. Nothing I cared about. But mine all the same. I held the mole up and looked into its blind face. And then I realized what love did. It changed your whole world. Even when you didn't want it to."
She learns about love from a mole!!! This gives me great happiness.
At the end, her brother Ned presents a paper entitled "Chaos Theory and Fairy Tales."
"Magic was real, that was his thesis. This thesis was at the very center of chaos theory-- if the tiniest of actions reverberated throughout the universe in invisible and unexpected ways, changing the weather and the climate, then anything was possible. The girl who sleeps for a hundred years does so because of a single choice to thread a needle. The golden ball that falls down the well rattles the world, changing everything. The bird that drops a feather, the butterfly that moves its wings, all of it drifts across the universe, through the woods, to the other side of the mountains. The dust you breathe in was once breathed out. The person you are, the weather around you, all of it is a spell you can't understand or explain."
CWs: suicide, cancer, parental death.