The Ice Queen (2005) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

Write a ridiculously simplified synopsis.

Summary edit see section history

Characters edit see section history

• Renny Mills: He is a 20-year-old guy who was hit by lightning and has gloves on his hands.
• Nina: She is Ned's wife.
• Lazarus Jones: Add a description of this character.
• Seth Jones
• Frances York: The other librarian in Orlon.
• Jack Lyons: The police captain in town. (New Jersey)
• Ned: He is the brother of the protagonist.
• Eliza: She is a nurse and a friend of Nina.
• Peggy Travis: The protagonist's physical therapist.
• Iris Mcginnis: She is the architecture student Renny was attracted to.
• Dragon: He was a lightning victim and was struck by the lightning twice.
• Dr. Wyman: He is the head neurologist on the protagonist's lightning case.
• Mariposa: She is the daughter of Ned and Nina.
• Marina Mills: She is Renny's younger sister.
• Carlos: He is the husband of Eliza.
• Giselle: The protagonist's cat, originally from her office mate.
• Marv: He is a chicken farmer and also a lightning victim.
• June Malone: She is a nurse.
• Craven: He is the protagonist's cardiologist.
• Paul: He is a graduate student.
• Joe: He is the son of the dragon.

Quotes edit see section history

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• “I had lost something before I'd known its worth, and now it was too late.”

• “Avoid life, perhaps that was the answer. The number one safety tip. *Stay away from it all.*”

• “What people read revealed so much about them that she considered our card catalog a treasure house of privileged secrets; each card contained the map of an individual's soul.”

• “People hide their truest natures. I understood that; I even applauded it. What sort of world would it be if people bled all over the sidewalks, if they wept under the trees, smacked whomever they despised, kissed strangers, revealed themselves? Keep a cloak, that was fine, the thing to do; present a disguise, the outside you, the one you want people to believe.”

• “How easy it was to be undone by some things. By these things. Red pearls. Truth. What you don't want to know, need to know, have to keep in the palm of your hand. Grab it, the stinging nettle, the wasp, the shard of glass. Do it. Then live with the consequences.”

• “'Secrets are only knowledge that hasn't yet been uncovered,' he told me. 'Therefore, they're not in fact secrets, but only unrealized truth.'”

  Ned

• “If a secret was only unrealized knowledge, as my brother had said, what harm could it do? How dangerous could a tiny shred of truth be? It had no thorns, no talons, no teeth nor tail nor sting. Truth, sleeping on the other side of what I knew. Of course, there were a hundred versions of the same story: a woman who has to learn what she already knows, somehow, somewhere inside.”

• “Be careful what you wish for. I know that for a fact. Wishes are brutal, unforgiving things.”

• “Of course I was self-centered, but don't most eight-year-old girls think they're the queen of the universe? Don't they command the stars and the seas? Don't they control the weather? When I closed my eyes to sleep at night, I imagined the rest of the world stopped as well. What I wanted. I thought I should get. What I wished for, I deserved.”

• “Don't feel anything. Don't even try. </3”

• “Crying wasn't like riding a bicycle; give it up and you quickly forget how it's done. </3”

• “A man who told his secrets was a man who lost his strength.”

• “His hands were rough covered with blisters. I wondered if the blisters caused him great pain. If he rubbed them with Vaseline. If some girl who loved him put his in her mouth, healed him with a kiss. ♥”

• “What is the difference between love and obsession? Didn’t both make you stay up all night, wandering the streets, a victim of your own imagination, your own heartbeat? Didn’t you fall into both, head into quicksand? Wasn’t every man in love a fool and every woman a slave? Love was like rain; it turned to ice, or it disappeared. Now you saw it, now you couldn’t see it no matter how hard you might search. Love evaporated; obsession was realer; it hurt, like a pin in your bottom, a stone in your shoe. It didn’t go away in the blink of an eye. A morning phone call with regret. A letter that said, Dear you, good-bye from me. Obsession tasted like something familiar. Something you’d known your whole life. It settled and lurked; it stayed with you.”

• “When it comes to death, heads or tails matters not. There is no escape in the end.”

• “Fairy tales are riddles, and people are riddles, too. Figure one out and he’s yours forever, whether he likes it or not.”

• “I was shaking, still wet, so he put his arms around me. I could feel the heat through his clothes. I could hear his heart beating, the strong heart that had defied death, that had stopped and come back to life. Nothing could have made me want him more. ♥”

• “It didn't make sense, and it didn't have to. t was as though I had one map inside my head and it led to the man who was waiting for me. ♥”

• “He had a beautiful smile, one that made me want him even more. ♥”

• “Don't you get it? You don't hide what you think is beautiful. You hide what's broken. You hide when you're a monster. </3”

  Renny Mills

• “How many women in how many stories had done this before? Mistrusted a lover, longed for an answer to a question that was not yet fully formed. If a secret was only unrealized knowledge, as my brother had said, what harm could it do? How dangerous could a tiny shred of truth be? It had no thorns, no talons, no teeth nor tail nor sting. Truth, sleeping on the other side of what I knew. Of course, there were a hundred versions of the same story: a woman who has to learn what she already knows, somehow, somewhere inside.”

• “I thought perhaps I'd discovered the difference between love and obsession. Only one of them puts you in jeopardy.”

• “And then I realized what love did. It changed your whole world. Even when you didn't want to.”

• “Sun and moon, brother and sister, the guardian and the guarded, opposites who gave each other form, guided each other until they stumbled home.”

• “Even a minute less time of him in my world would be too hard. </3”

• “Feel lucky for what you have when you have it. Isn't that the point? Happily ever after doesn't mean happy forever. The ever after, what precisely was that? Your dreams, your life, your death, your everything. Was it the blank space that went on without us? The forever after we were gone? </3”

• “So now. So here. So him. The heat, the black night, the stars, the moment, the ever after inside of us. ♥”

• “It was a cool night, but these oranges kept in heat. Little globes burning sunlight. We carried the basket together. For this one night, in love, in love. Everything meant something to us. Black sky, black trees, red oranges, sweet smell of the earth, the heat when he whispered to me, the sound of our feet on the dirt paths, the sprinkler system switching on, water falling.♥”

• “We took off our clothes in the orchard and went under the sprinklers. In the night air, under water, we could embrace each other any way we wanted to. There was no one for miles around. No one else at all. I loved the way he felt, so real, so here, so now. I loved his muscles under his skin, the heat from his body, the way his kisses burned. I loved the way it hurt, the way it made me know I was alive, now and in the ever after, seeing red, wanting to go down on my hands and knees, not caring if there was another person in the universe. No wonder people did this however and with whomever; with strangers, in parking lots, desperate, greedy; joined together, you can imagine you're not alone, the only one. So different, because when you are in love, that's the joke: you feel your aloneness so deeply it hurts. When I'm not with you. ♥”

• “We were a human example of chaos theory, thrown together by circumstance. We didn't belong together, I knew that. But for one night we were perfect. ♥”

• “Without you I would have been completely alone. ♥”

  Lazarus Jones

• “I loved him in a way that was over. A way that was the beginning of something. The sort of love that opened you up for more. ♥”

• “This was what it was. The ruin of it. The depth of it. Have it once and you can't have it again. That's the riddle. That's the truth.”

• “Ned: What do you know? | Nina: I know I love you. ♥”

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• 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.

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• Love was like rain: it turned to ice, or it disappeared.

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• Avoid life, perhaps that was the answer. The number one safety tip. Stay away from it all.

  Highlighted by 5 Kindle customers

• The moment that changes the path of a life is the one that’s invisible, that dissolves like sugar in water.

  Highlighted by 5 Kindle customers

• I mean one defining secret. The essence of a person. If you figure that out, you figure out the riddle of that particular human being.”

  Highlighted by 5 Kindle customers

• At the heart of his paper was the notion that fairy tales relieved us of our need for order and allowed us impossible, irrational desires. Magic was real, that was his thesis. This thesis was at the very center of chaos theory—if the tiniest of actions reverberated throughout the universe in invisible and unexpected ways, changing the weather and the climate, then anything was possible.

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• But the logic of fairy tales was that there was no logic: bad things happened to the innocent, children were set out in the woods by their parents, fear walked hand in hand with experience, a wish spoken aloud could make it so.

  Highlighted by 4 Kindle customers

• “Secrets are only knowledge that hasn’t yet been uncovered,” he told me. “Therefore, they’re not in fact secrets, but only unrealized truth.”

  Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers

• “Without thunderstorms, the earth would lose its electrical charge in less than an hour,”

  Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers

• “It’s the living that scares me most of all,”

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Florida
• New Jersey
• Orlon Public Library: This is where the protagonist of the story worked with Frances York as librarians.
• Jacksonville, Florida

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Alice Hoffman (Author)

Other Contributors:

1. Little, Brown and Company (Publisher)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 813.54

Notes for Parents edit see section history

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Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( H ) › Hoffman, Alice
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Women's Fiction › Single Women
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary