- Gebundene Ausgabe: 211 Seiten
- Verlag: Little Brown and Company (4. April 2005)
- Sprache: Englisch
- ISBN-10: 0316058599
- ISBN-13: 978-0316058599
- Größe und/oder Gewicht: 23,4 x 15,6 x 3 cm
- Durchschnittliche Kundenbewertung: 4.3 von 5 Sternen Alle Rezensionen anzeigen (3 Kundenrezensionen)
- Amazon Bestseller-Rang: Nr. 1.713.346 in Englische Bücher (Siehe Top 100 in Englische Bücher)
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Produktinformation |
Mehr über den Autor
Entdecken Sie Bücher, lesen Sie über Autoren und mehr
› Besuchen Sie die Seite von Alice Hoffman auf Amazon
› Besuchen Sie die Seite von Alice Hoffman auf Amazon
Produktbeschreibungen
Amazon.com
A solitary New Jersey librarian whose favorite book is a guide to suicide methods is struck by lightning in Alice Hoffman's superb novel, The Ice Queen. Orphaned at the age of eight after angrily wishing she would never see her mother again, our heroine found herself frozen emotionally: "I was the child who stomped her feet and made a single wish and in so doing ended the whole world‹my world, at any rate." Her brother Ned solved the pain of their mother's death by becoming a meteorologist: applying reason and logic to bad weather. Eventually, he invites our heroine to move down to Florida, where he teaches at a university. Here, while trying to swat a fly, she is struck by lightning (the resulting neurological damage includes an inability to see the color red). Orlon County turns out to receive two thirds of all the lightning strikes in Florida each year, and our heroine soon becomes drawn into the mysteries of lightning: the withering of trees and landscape near a strike, the medical traumas and odd new abilities of victims, the myths of renewal. Although a recluse, she becomes fascinated by a legendary local farmer nicknamed Lazarus Jones, said to have beaten death after a lightning strike: to have seen the other side and come back. The burning match to her cool reserve--her personal unguided tour through Hades--Lazarus will prove to be the talisman that restores her to girlhood innocence and possibility.
Hoffman's story advances with a feline economy of language and movement--not a word spared for the color of the sky, unless the color of the sky factors into the narrative. Among the authors who have played with the fairy tale's harsh mercies (e.g. Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter), Hoffman has the closest understanding of the primal fears that drive the genre, and why, perhaps, we never outgrow fairy stories, but only learn to substitute dull, wholesome qualities like personal initiative or good timing for the elements that raise the hairs on our neck and send us scrambling for the light switch. --Regina Marler
From Booklist
Over the course of writing her 18 beguiling novels, Hoffman has perfected her nique and vivifying blend of romance, magic, and redemption, a mode of storytelling she uses with great panache to link the workings of nature with the spectrum of human emotions. Here she draws on her key inspiration, fairy tales, and her fascination with how chaos theory makes the connection between, let's say, the flapping of a bat's wings and a young girl's anger at her mother. Ever since she was eight years old, Hoffman's narrator, a devoted reference librarian, has believed that her temper tantrum caused her mother's death. Her guilt turned her solitary, stoic, and somewhat misanthropic, and she envisions herself as an ice queen. Even after she is struck by lightning. As her damaged narrator reluctantly joins a lightning-strike-survivor support group, Hoffman dramatizes the bizarre effects experienced by real-life lightning strike survivors, and orchestrates a highly erotic and risky romance between the ice queen and a fellow survivor known as Lazarus, whose breath ignites paper. As Hoffman's spellbinding and wonderfully insightful tale unfurls, she pays charming tribute to librarians, revels in metaphors of hot and cold, and poetically explores the meaning of trust, the chemistry of healing, and the reach of love. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Welche anderen Artikel kaufen Kunden, nachdem sie diesen Artikel angesehen haben?
In diesem Buch
(Mehr dazu)
Nach einer anderen Ausgabe dieses Buches suchen.
Nach einer anderen Ausgabe dieses Buches suchen.
Tags(Was ist das?)Bei einem Tag handelt es sich um ein Schlagwort, das zum Produkt passt.
Tags erleichtern allen Kunden die Suche und die Sortierung ihrer Lieblingsprodukte. |
Eine digitale Version dieses Buchs im Kindle-Shop verkaufen
Wenn Sie ein Verleger oder Autor sind und die digitalen Rechte an einem Buch haben, können Sie die digitale Version des Buchs in unserem Kindle-Shop verkaufen.
Weitere Informationen
Kundenrezensionen
Die hilfreichsten Kundenrezensionen
Format:Taschenbuch
Remember childhood superstitions? "Step on a crack, you'll break your mother's back." So, as youngsters we did all we could do to avoid those sidewalk cracks. How about wishing upon a star? Many of us once believed that if you wished upon the first star you saw at night and wished hard enough that wish just might come true.
Fortunately, most of us do not have the ability of Alice Hoffman's narrator who begins her story by saying, "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've made far too many wishes in my lifetime, the first when I was eight years old."
Her wish was that she would never see her mother again, and that proved to be true. A fatal automobile accident on an icy road takes her mother's life and forever changes our heroine who grows up to become a librarian, an ice queen if you will, remaining apart, aloof and trying to convince herself that she does not care.
Ned, her older brother by four years, takes a different route. He becomes a meteorologist, studying adverse weather conditions. In adulthood he invites her to join him in Florida. Once there, she is struck by lightning which serves to melt her long nurtured reserve.
There are many other survivors of lightning strikes, one in particular - Lazarus Jones, who was supposedly dead for forty minutes after being struck. Once she begins to thaw the ice queen realizes all that she has been missing and seeks out Lazarus.
The love affair that develops between them is pure Hoffman - a bit of magic as fire meets ice. Written in impeccable prose, The Ice Queen is superbly crafted, the work of a master wordsmith. This all too brief story is an affirmation of life and all that it offers; it is one we will not soon forget.
Enjoy!
- Gail Cooke
Fortunately, most of us do not have the ability of Alice Hoffman's narrator who begins her story by saying, "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've made far too many wishes in my lifetime, the first when I was eight years old."
Her wish was that she would never see her mother again, and that proved to be true. A fatal automobile accident on an icy road takes her mother's life and forever changes our heroine who grows up to become a librarian, an ice queen if you will, remaining apart, aloof and trying to convince herself that she does not care.
Ned, her older brother by four years, takes a different route. He becomes a meteorologist, studying adverse weather conditions. In adulthood he invites her to join him in Florida. Once there, she is struck by lightning which serves to melt her long nurtured reserve.
There are many other survivors of lightning strikes, one in particular - Lazarus Jones, who was supposedly dead for forty minutes after being struck. Once she begins to thaw the ice queen realizes all that she has been missing and seeks out Lazarus.
The love affair that develops between them is pure Hoffman - a bit of magic as fire meets ice. Written in impeccable prose, The Ice Queen is superbly crafted, the work of a master wordsmith. This all too brief story is an affirmation of life and all that it offers; it is one we will not soon forget.
Enjoy!
- Gail Cooke
Format:Taschenbuch
I liked it. A friend described as a fairy tale for grown-ups and, being Xmas, I thought to give it a try. Well, it is not a fairy tale but it is a fantastic tale. What happens is all real but it is so imaginative that the result is magic. Sad and romantic story. This is my first book by Alice Hoffman. Surely not the last one.
Format:Gebundene Ausgabe
... and I, an avid reader of Hoffman's tales, have not expected otherwise. In a lot of ways, this book is typical of her: a troubled adolescent grows into a troubled woman, who in her thirties becomes obsessed with an equally troubled, beautiful dark eyed younger man. To her own detriment, this woman can't let go of her past. More than anything, she is afraid of loss; it makes sense to her not to allow love into her life. She hides her true nature, which is deeply passionate. She limits herself to just functioning and of course, such a reduced life is an unhappy one. In Florida, she is struck by lightning, which she had wished upon herself. Damaged and handicapped, she still survives.
Now what I really love about all of Alice Hoffman's books is the magic she creates. Alice Hoffman has a beautiful way to write: both dreamy and down-to earth (especially the dialogues). Therefore the way she describes life's tragedies as poignantly as she illustrates the wonder of being alive at all is an achievement, never a contradiction. Here, the ice queen's regained ability to see the colour red, which she previously lost when struck by lightning, is a typical image Hoffman likes to employ.
I also love about her books that dogs and cats are often important characters with (of course!) a personality of their own.
My favourite books by Alice Hoffman are "Second Nature" and "Turtle Moon"; I would give them six stars if I could. "The Ice Queen" gets four stars because the book didn't hold many surprises for me and I wish Hoffman hadn't used shorter sentences than she usually does. As a result, her beautiful writing style is less fluent; I sometimes had the impression she wanted to experiment a little.
Nevertheless, I do recommend "The Ice Queen" because I could never not recommend something written by Hoffman, this writer who uniquely combines magic and reality.
Now what I really love about all of Alice Hoffman's books is the magic she creates. Alice Hoffman has a beautiful way to write: both dreamy and down-to earth (especially the dialogues). Therefore the way she describes life's tragedies as poignantly as she illustrates the wonder of being alive at all is an achievement, never a contradiction. Here, the ice queen's regained ability to see the colour red, which she previously lost when struck by lightning, is a typical image Hoffman likes to employ.
I also love about her books that dogs and cats are often important characters with (of course!) a personality of their own.
My favourite books by Alice Hoffman are "Second Nature" and "Turtle Moon"; I would give them six stars if I could. "The Ice Queen" gets four stars because the book didn't hold many surprises for me and I wish Hoffman hadn't used shorter sentences than she usually does. As a result, her beautiful writing style is less fluent; I sometimes had the impression she wanted to experiment a little.
Nevertheless, I do recommend "The Ice Queen" because I could never not recommend something written by Hoffman, this writer who uniquely combines magic and reality.
Möchten Sie weitere Rezensionen zu diesem Artikel anzeigen?
Waren diese Rezensionen hilfreich?
Wir wollen von Ihnen hören.
Kunden diskutieren
|
Das Forum zu diesem Produkt
Fragen stellen, Meinungen austauschen, Einblicke gewinnen Aktive Diskussionen in ähnlichen Foren
Kundendiskussionen durchsuchen
|
Ähnliche Foren
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Lieblingslisten
Ähnliche Artikel finden
Anhand des Sachgebietes nach ähnlichen Produkten suchen:
Ihr Kommentar
Möchten Sie die Produktinformationen aktualisieren oder Feedback zu den Produktabbildungen geben?
