In 'Ice Queen,' a frosty heroine and a warmed-over moral
The Ice Queen
By Alice Hoffman
Little, Brown, 211 pp., $23.95
Love scenes frequently involve heat, but usually it's of the scented-candle variety. Alice Hoffman takes heat imagery one step further in her novel ''The Ice Queen," in which a frosty and fusty reference librarian ditches New Jersey for Florida, gets hit by lightning, and finds herself drawn to a fellow lightning-strike survivor whose touch literally sizzles. Preparing herself to kiss Lazarus Jones -- so named because he returned to life after a strike left him dead -- the librarian fills her mouth with ice cubes. But she can protect herself only so much; mid-smooch, Jones's scorching mouth makes the ice boil, giving new meaning to the sobriquet ''hot lips."
This initial encounter between heat and cold -- for our narrator is the unfeeling ''ice queen" of the title -- is evoked in breathless terms: ''I kissed him, mouth open. I could feel the heat from inside him melting through, but I kept at it. It was why I was here, I knew that now. I couldn't stop kissing him. I heard myself, my desire, and I couldn't believe it was me. . . . The riddle inside me: How do you melt ice? How can you move when you're frozen inside?"
The answer, it seems, is to hook up with a 25-year-old loner -- a hunk, a drifter, a renegade -- and engage in days of ice-cradled sexual activity.
The prolific Hoffman, whose novels include ''Here on Earth," ''Turtle Moon," and ''Illumination Night," has a marked interest in the lives of outsiders and oddballs. All sorts of iconoclasts populate her work, from the single mother bucking the values of Eisenhower-era suburbia in ''Seventh Heaven" to the witchy women in ''Practical Magic." Supernatural elements shape much of Hoffman's writing. ''I'm interested in witchcraft's symbolic essence and history more than in the 'craft' itself," Hoffman told Publishers Weekly, ''what it means to be a woman in this society and an outcast."
With its lightning-addled Miss Lonelyhearts at its center, ''The Ice Queen" continues in the tradition of Hoffman's earlier work. Like Hoffman, the narrator is a devotee of fairy tales. And, like so many of her fairy-tale counterparts, she inhabits a world of life-and-death wishes. As a child she wishes that her mother will not return from a night out with the gals; later that evening her mother dies in a car crash on an icy road. Wracked with guilt, she chops off her hair and turns chilly and remote, unable to cope with genuine emotions or personal entanglements. Her new motto: ''Don't feel anything. Don't even try." As an adult she makes another wish, praying that her sickly grandmother will be released from her pain. The next thing you know, Grandma's dead.
Shortly thereafter the narrator's brother, a meteorology whiz at the fictional Orlon University in Florida, persuades her to join him in the Sunshine State. She's as unmoored in these swampy surroundings as she was at home, but then a wish to get struck by lightning comes true. Hobbled and humbled, afflicted with a limp and a ''frozen" heart, she decides to track down the legendary Jones, to learn how he stared down death. ''I wanted a man like that," she says, ''one it was impossible to kill." She is terrified of death; he, as it turns out, is scared of living. Together, perhaps, they can heal.
''The Ice Queen" is almost entirely devoid of narrative or psychological complexity. It's clear from the get-go how the romance will turn out, how it will lead to redemption and the thawing of an all-too-human heart. The warmed-over moral -- give love and you will get love -- is familiar to all Lifetime viewers and Hallmark patrons. Every plot development along the way is contrived to hurry the narrator along to her emotional breakthrough. Hoffman places various wounded souls in the narrator's path, including a young man whose hands were disfigured in a lightning strike, a seriously sad sister-in-law, and a half-dead mole. Realizing that others experience heartbreak inevitably prompts the narrator's icy veneer to splinter. Her discovery that she is capable of loving prompts the ice to split open. Love, she realizes, ''changed your whole world."
Through much of the book Hoffman forgets that Writing 101 dictum -- ''Show, don't tell" --and instead barrages us with ponderous descriptions of love, obsession, and family relationships. The book often has a dashed-off feel, especially as the same images and turns of phrase keep appearing. Everything in this novel is pale, or icy, or cold. The lightning strike destroys the narrator's ability to see red, so she's frequently shown gazing at a red object and likening it to something else, whether it's blood (''It looked like paste to me"), red wine (''It looked like mud to me"), or blood again (''[It] looked like snow to me").
Two-thirds of the way through, Hoffman thrusts the narrator's brother to center stage. The narrator learns that her brother has a tragic secret, and the novel becomes even further mired in tear-jerking territory. By this point Hoffman is unable to resist her soggiest impulses; there's an eleventh-hour plot twist involving the mother's death that not only feels tacked on but also defies narrative logic.
A novel as concerned with themes of loss and heartache should inspire some tears, but ''The Ice Queen" is about as poignant as a Tupperware demonstration. Even if the narrator doesn't feel manipulated by Hoffman's maneuverings, it's likely many readers will.
Amy Kroin's reviews have appeared in The 
