Darlene's Reviews > The Ice Queen

"Be careful what you wish for. I know that for a fact. Wishes are brutal, unforgiving things. They
burn your tongue the moment they're spoken and you can never take them back. They bruise
and bake and come back to haunt you……."

I read The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman years ago but recently I stumbled across the audio version and decided to listen. I really liked reading the book but listening to this audiobook narrated by Nancy Travis was a whole different experience… different in a good way, that is.

The story begins on a cold January night… the 16th of the month, in fact. It is told in the first person so we never actually know the narrator's name. What we DO discover is on that January evening, the storyteller, an 8 year-old girl makes a wish that will forever change the course of her life. It turns out that January 16 is her mother's birthday and her mother was to meet a couple of girlfriends for a celebratory dinner. The night was rainy…. and the rain,a s it fell, had begun to freeze. Following her mother onto the porch, the girl begged her mother to stay home and braid her hair and read from her favorite book of fairy tales. When her mother simply kissed her goodbye, the wish that had been in her head quickly slipped out of her lips…. "Right away I could feel it burning. I could taste the bitterness of it; still I went ahead. I wished I would never see her again….". And the next morning, well.. the girl awoke to the news that her mother had never arrived at her birthday dinner. Her car had gone off the road and her mother was never coming home……

This young girl who had lived so much of her short life immersed in fairy tales believed in the power of wishes. She believed that her wish, made in anger and yes, selfishness caused her mother's death. And from that moment on, the ice that had covered the ground, the trees and the road her mother had driven on seemed to encapsulate her heart. She and her older brother Ned went to live with their grandmother and from the outside, their lives went on…. but the girl remained steadfast in her belief that her heart was justifiably frozen.

The story takes us through the many years of the girl's lonely life. She grows up and becomes a librarian mainly because of the isolation that position allows her. She develops an obsession with death and begins researching and reading everything she can find about all the ways there are to die. Eventually, her grandmother, with whom she had been living all these years dies and she has no idea what to do. Her brother Ned, who has become a meteorologist and has moved to Florida brings her to Florida and arranges a life for her there… a simple life as a librarian in the local library. Ned works at Orlon College where he is a consultant to physicians and neurologist who work with survivors of lightning strikes. Orlon is the 'lightning strike capital of the world' Ned tells our narrator on their way to Florida. Almost flippantly and without considering her words, she once again makes a wish.. that lightning should strike her and put an end to her pitiful life. But given her strongly held belief in the power of wishes, of course, it one day comes true. Alone in her house on a particularly hot and muggy evening, a ball of lightning no bigger than a tennis ball travels through her window and with a brilliance like that of the sun, she is struck.

Another wish comes true…. or at least it does in part. Our narrator survives the lightning strike. She finally leaves the hospital broken and damaged…. with her heart fluttering and skipping a beat, numb on one side of her body, a constant, maddening clicking sound in her head, an inability to see the color red, and a physical chill which seems to have seeped into her very bones. Attending a support group for lightening strike survivors, she learns of a man the townspeople refer to as Lazarus Jones, another lightening strike survivor who receives the name Lazarus because after being struck he had been dead (no pulse or heartbeat) for 40 minutes.. before being thrust into a bath of ice which forced him back to life. Still obsessed with death, our narrator sets out to meet this man whom she believes had faced down death. What she discovers when she find him catches her by surprise… he was her kindred spirit and yet her opposite. Whereas she felt a constant bone chilling coldness, Lazarus emanated intense heat.. able to boil water simply by breathing on it. Her coldness kept her from experiencing human touch and Lazarus radiated so much heat that he had been unable to touch anyone since he had been struck. But touch these two did, beginning an obsessive and intense love affair.. meeting again and again to immerse themselves in baths filled with frigid water. She returned home from these encounters covered with burn blisters but the pain she felt seemed finally like the proof she needed that she was actually alive. She was discovering that the ice she had encased herself in so many years before was finally being chipped away… one touch at a time. Yes, she and Lazarus were both broken and damaged people and both were closely and greedily guarding the dark secrets they held but slowly they were helping each other to come back to life… almost as if they had been in suspended animation.

I have never been a person who enjoyed reading fairy tales.. not even as a child; and although this novel is a kind of fairy tale within a fairy tale, I was amazed by the imagery Alice Hoffman utilized in this story. Mainly, Ms. Hoffman cleverly made use of imagery created by the magnificent power of nature. I could FEEL the pinpricks of the ice on the narrator's young bare feet as she hurried onto the frozen front porch after her mother. I could SEE the brilliance of the ball of lightning which entered her window, blinding her before striking. I felt chilled as I imagined her sad little girl's heart encased in ice… an ice which kept her figuratively imprisoned in suspended animation for many, many years. I loved Ms. Hoffman's use of the frightening power of lightning.. its incredible power when its heat and energy both infuse the earth with necessary nitrogen which enriches the soil so that the earth's inhabitants may find nourishment; but at the same time having the capability to destroy everything it touches, even stopping the heart of a human being.

But I think what I loved most about this novel is its message of redemption and second chances. There is a school of thought which espouses that human beings create everything they experience in the world through the power of their thoughts… whatever you think, is what you experience. I don't know that I believe that even if it IS interesting to think about. But I thought about that 'philosophy' while listening to this story and I couldn't help but hope that the universe, in all of its infinite capacity to inflict harshness on its inhabitants, wouldn't be so cruel as to punish a young girl who uttered thoughtlessly and perhaps selfishly a wish without truly understanding the consequences of that wish. This story was also about guilt and the everlasting self-loathing that that seems to flow from feeling a guilt that you can never hope to eliminate because for whatever the reason, there is no chance of ever asking for forgiveness. This story shows that the magical powers of connections formed between human beings can transform and transcend the power of even the most ferocious forces of nature… including our own guilt and grief.

I highly recommend listening to the audio version of this book. I found that listening enhanced my appreciation of the imagery displayed within this beautiful story.