There are many professions in which the practitioners create an alternative reality. We call these people great writers or celebrated actors or artful advertisers or successful salespeople. They fashion entire worlds from words and make you believe you’re a part of those environments. At times the surroundings are ones that we actively want to be a part of – the beach volleyball game studded with models drinking from the bottles of beer encrusted with jewels of sparkling condensation. Other settings are ones we can safely observe from a distance and shudder with hope that we’ll never encounter in our lives. There is the smallest of lines that separates these people from those we consider to be bald-faced liars, or simply delusional. Some days it’s hard to tell the difference.

Books: The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman. Speaking of different realities, Alice Hoffman is one of the finest creators of magical realism in her novels and short stories. Although the topic of this book – the after-effects of being struck by lightning – is intriguing, the story itself is weak and consists of many sentence fragments that apparently are intended to convey the splintered reality of the woman who has become a literal ice queen and her lover who burns from within. Perhaps this story will be redeemed in the last few chapters of the book. (I wrote this before I had finished the book which did, indeed, have a tremendously moving ending. The last 1/3 of the book made the first sections (which were not quite phoned-in, but almost) worth reading.)