Surprisingly Good!

#20 - The Ice Queen, by Alice Hoffman
Finished 4/26/07
Rating: 4/5
Total Pages: 211
Reason for Reading: Recommended by a friend
REVIEW: What an unusual love story!! And what lovely words used to tell it. This book wasn’t anything like what I expected it to be. I was greatly misled by the cover, which said to me -- “typical fairytale romance, likely Harlequin style.” But Hoffman is much more sophisticated than that and has a wealth of imagination and wondrously beautiful ideas. I literally devoured the book (and I should have been STUDYING, damnit! LOL!). Only two very minor complaints that pulled this down from a perfect 5: First, I had the underlying feeling that she just tried to pack TOO MANY really good ideas into a single book. There were fabulous themes here that could have created more good stories. There were almost TOO MANY symbols to follow. On the other hand, this is a positive, because it gives me a very good reason to read it again and think harder about all the hidden meanings. *grins* Secondly, the last 50 pages fell just slightly flat of the rest of the book. Somehow she lost a bit of the previous intensity, and the story was tied up just a little too neatly at the end. Neither of these detract from the fact that The Ice Queen was a really great read. Recommended.

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W A R N I N G - - - S P O I L E R S

This is easily the most unusual and captivating book I've read in awhile. We're talking survivors of lightning strikes, a woman who's lost the ability to see the colour red, the power of wishes, flesh that glows with gold, a fascination with death and the books that people take out of the library, and of course the theme of ice that permeates the entire novel. This is an author with some truly great ideas, and I couldn't wait to see what interesting thing might happen next.

Lots and lots of great quotes throughout.... The second quote below reveals a major plot point, so stop reading HERE if you don't wanna know!! *grins*

“My stomach was lurching around. I was falling into something. Hard. If I stayed, my bones would shatter; I’d break into pieces at his feet. Stupid girl. Stupid me.” [p. 83]

"Lazarus was marked by the moment of his strike, covered by what were called lightning figures. I'd read about them in a book my brother gave me. Usually they were treelike images imprinted on the body of someone struck by lightning. No one was certain if the images were actually trees or if instead they were some interior path of the veins and arteries. Some experts felt that these designs were shadows caused by extreme bright light; similar images could be produced on glass by large charges of electricity. Handprints appeared on trees, or the perfect shadow of a horse might be captured on the side of a barn; the last image a person had seen as he'd been struck by lightning was cast onto his skin, his soul. All that remained." [p. 134]

Listening to: Stay in My Corner (The Dells) on iTunes Oldies104.
Thinking about: All the studying left to do.....BYE!!!! :)