Ice Queen/Alice Hoffman

I don't know why this novel brought Wally Lamb to mind, but it did. The prose are not lush like Lamb's and the story is not as dramatically delivered as Lamb tends to be - this is Hoffman after all. It might be something about the descriptions. In this novel, Hoffman gives the reader a glimpse into the internal life of the characters you rarely see and would never expect. Lamb, I think, does that as well, differently though.

Initially, the conceit of this novel seemed a little too easy to me and having just finished Alvarez the spareness was somewhat jarring, but within twenty or so pages Hoffman had me. Our Ice Queen is a single New Jersey librarian who made a wish when she was a child that ended her life as she knew it ad rendered her emotionally frozen and obsessed with death. Many years later, she is stuck by lightening and the great thaw begins.... See, you're rolling your eyes just a little aren't you? But it's a faerie tale people, and a good one.

I read some reviews that focus on the rebirth of Ice Queen. Her slow thaw to the world around her and what she's allowed herself to miss in her frozen state definitely drive the narrative. The thaw being the catalyst for all the action of the novel. The Ice Queen agrees to participate in a study with other survivors of lightening strikes, ultimately searching out the reclusive Lazarus, whose strike basically set him on fire, permanently. She's frozen, he is boiling, the middle ground is pretty obvious. In the meantime, there is a parallel story line between our narrator and her older brother, who shared in the tragic events set in motion by the young narrator's wish, and their relative estrangement. The study she joins is part of his work; therefore, drawing them closer while at the same time highlighting their distance. And so the narrator evolves into someone else, she sheds her cocoon and ...

but I was more struck by other elements. Hoffman's imagining of a faerie tale and the primal fears that drive such tales evolves into exploration of sorts for the source of that primal fear. The Ice Queen's strike might have sparked some heat into her frozen veins but it also gave her a quantifiable, comparable sort of damage. One that, I would argue, gave her a space from which to see others'. On some level, don't our fears generate as a direct result of our individual damage, or rather how we qualify that damage? It doesn't require the same event between two people for their fears to mirror one another, just a similar processing of their damage...or does it? I can't say I know for sure, but it is the thing at which this novel seems to be driving at - straight through your heart.