The Ice Queen - Alice Hoffman

A modern adult fairy tale about fire and ice, this worked brilliantly on its own terms and was utterly captivating, but the magic and drama were too strong to really let it get under my skin, apart from in the very human beginning and ending sections. I was also strangely unsettled by the ability of the central characters to take decisive and bold actions to bring about seemingly impossible events. The parts I was most intrigued by were those about the more mysterious effects of lightning strikes, but in this kind of book it's hard to tell how realistic these accounts were...