The day she made her wish to never see her mother again, when she wished her to disappear right there, right then, The Ice Queen won her inner secret name. For when her mother died in a car accident, she stopped feelings to enter her realm. The cold companions of silence and solitude have been walking on her side since the age of eight. A good reason to choose a librarian career, plus she likes fairy tales, rather Grimm's than Andersen's, as she prefers darker fates to nice bed stories.
When she got struck by lightning, loosing the ability to see the red color and gaining a clickety sound in her head, she met other survivors, and she heard about Seth “Lazarus” Jones, a man who came back from the deads with so much heat inside he could set a paper on fire by merely blowing on it.
“Well, you're here,” Lazarus said. “What do you want?”Love likes opposites and thrives on hidden secrets. Ice met Fire, a passion precariously set on a melting point. But like too many a fairy tale, that urge to know the secret within must be restrained by trust or faith, lest everything falls apart.
This sounded like a trick question to me. If I answered incorrectly, perhaps I would turn into ash myself, burned alive.
We stared at each other. Putting my hand through glass was nothing compared with this. I was in this moment, no other time. Now when I thought about New Jersey it was like remembering a mythological country.
You had to do the thing you were most afraid of, didn't you? In every fairy tale the right way was the difficult path, the one that led over boulders, through brambles, across a field of fire. I took a step forward and looped my arms around Lazarus Jones's neck so I could be near him. Every person has a secret, this was mine: I couldn't begin anything that remotely resembled a life until I understood death.
If you need a musical background when reading this book or something to listen to to get ready for it, I'm sure Suzanne Vega is the best option.
The Ice Queen (Back Bay Books publisher, 2001, 224 pages) has been written by Alice Hoffman, an American novelist born in 1952 in New York City.
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