Alice Hoffman is a captivating author. This is a compassionate, enchanting story. Gentle, dark, sad; Touched with redemption, love, hope; full of fairy tales and tragedy, lightning strikes, struggles, healing. I like the way you think the character's thoughts and feel what she feels as she processes and grows and learns. Beautiful language and deep thoughts on life and death. Good read. ( )

The Ice Queen is more than a story, it’s almost an internal extensive self-dialogue. The narrator (unnamed and it took me the whole novel to realize that) at a young age wishes her mother dead and her wish comes true. Because of this she wanders through the rest of her life half asleep, always cold, and alone. When she is struck by lightning her brother moves her to Florida where the real meat of the story starts. She makes a friend, finds a lover, and salvages a relationship with her brother. In essence, it’s a coming of age story about a lonely woman who finds life on the other side of death. Hoffman’s voice of this character cannot be compared, it’s complete and true and feels 100 percent real. The novel is tense and suspenseful at times, making you feel like the other shoe is about to drop. And it’s lonely and sad at others. We feel the Florida humidty and taste the oranges. of the two Hoffman novels I’ve read, the other being The Third Angel, it’s not my favorite. But it is something writers should check out as a fabulous example of how to write a solid, consistent voice of a character. And it’s also full of lovely little “this is how life is” lines that belong in a book of quotes. ( )

Sometimes I like Alice Hoffman's writing, and sometimes not. This definitely falls into the latter.
I didn't like the characters, didn't like the story, didn't believe all the secrets, got very tired of all the endless questioning: "Was this love?" "Could she ever really love?" "What is love, really?" - that kind of stuff. Hoffman certainly can write, but this book does not evince that. ( )

The nameless narrator is a librarian, has just moved from New Jersey to Florida when she's hit by lightning - not a metaphorical bolt from the blue, but a full-wattage flash that leaves her bald and colour-blind.

Encouraged to join a self-help group for recovering patients, she learns about Lazarus Jones, a fellow strike victim rumoured to have survived 40 minutes without a heartbeat. Irresistibly drawn to a man who has cheated death, the librarian drives to his home she discovers a 25-year-old loner with eyes the colour of ashes.

The last half of the book details her redemption where she begins to thaw and ends up making sense of life. ( )

This is a captivating modern fairytale about one woman's journey through tragedy and pain, towards truth, freedom and happiness. It opens with a little girl in a rage, standing on her porch making a terrible wish that her mother will die. When it comes true and she dies in a car accident that very night, the girl is consumed by an agonising pain and guilt that will haunt her into womanhood. To cope with everything she grows cold, burying herself in dark fairy stories and books on death, closing herself off from emotion and social contact even as she maintains her dependable image at the local library reference desk.

Everything changes when she moves to Florida, where her brother is now a married meteorologist working at a university. One fateful day, she is struck by lightning as she stands by her window. Her heart is a shard of ice, her body ravaged and her vision altered so she sees only crystal white or dull grey in place of the colour red. Agreeing to participate in her brother's research on lightning survivors, she begins to understand herself in light of the others' stories. Renny has hands threaded with gold where the lightning branded him with his own jewellery. The Dragon, struck twice, can spit fire.

And then she meets Lazarus Jones, a reclusive man who was struck by lightning and died for forty five minutes before inexplicably waking up in the morgue. He is her opposite, a man whose touch burns and whose breath is hot enough to set things on fire. Yet there is a spark of understanding between them and in their mutual need for human contact they begin a passionate and secretive love affair, the Ice Queen and the burning man. Thus, slowly, through their union and their gradual rehabilitation of mind and body, they find truth, peace and themselves. Finally the Ice Queen has thawed and can look outside of herself and her obsession with her past in time for a moving yet hopeful climax.

Woven through with fairy stories, lightning myth and the chaos theory, this is a moving and compelling novel that is utterly unlike anything I have ever read before. It manages to be beautiful yet macabre, and the ideas are expressed in pure poetry. Although it occasionally veered into a kind of self-conscious disjointedness, I couldn't put it down and was thoroughly immersed in it from start to finish. Each of the characters are touched by magic, and Lazarus Jones is a particularly strong, sexy and brooding anti-hero! The book has gone straight to the top of my wish list and I think it will haunt me for a long time. I'll definitely be seeking out more Hoffman in the near future... ( )