The Country of Ice Cream Star

Starred review from December 22, 2014
Newman’s latest depicts a dystopian future in which America has been decimated by “Posies,” a powerful plague that leaves few living beyond 20 years of age. Ice Cream Star, the novel’s 15-year-old narrator, is a member of the Sengles tribe of the Massa Woods, which was once Massachusetts. Ice Cream’s brother, Driver, the 18-year-old leader of the Sengles, has just begun coughing—the first telltale sign of the plague. During a standard raid of an abandoned neighborhood for left-behind supplies, Ice Cream and her fellow raiders capture Pasha, a stranger to Massa, who is a shocking 30 years old and knows a rumor about a Posies cure. Ice Cream begins her harrowing adventure to find it and save her brother—and maybe the rest of the country in the process. Written entirely in the broken English of these short-lived children, now generations removed from the plague’s onset, Newman’s novel is ambitious, taking on race, sex, class, religion, politics, and war all at once. What sets the work apart is its unapologetic narrator, whose fantastically unbridled, wholly teenage point of view renders each page a pleasure to read.

September 15, 2014

In a postapocalyptic America, where for generations everyone has died before 20 of a dread disease called Posies, 15-year-old Ice Cream Star sets out to find a rumored cure when her brother shows signs of ailing. Touted as good YA crossover, with references being made (obviously) to Suzanne Collins's lodestar "The Hunger Games" trilogy, though the comparison made to Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation is more telling.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2014

Ice Cream Star is a courageous and charismatic 15-year-old girl, a near elder in her small band of black children living in the chaotic Massachusetts countryside in the aftermath of an epidemic that has wiped out most of the population. The disease continues to infect and kill all people before they reach their 20th birthday. As her older brother falls ill and she assumes leadership of her tribe, Ice Cream forms an unlikely friendship with Pasha, one of the rarely glimpsed white "roos" (Russians) who are widely feared and despised. Pasha, whose people have developed a cure, inspires Ice Cream to lead her tribe on an expedition to acquire the remedy through warfare. This literary dystopia inhabits a fully imagined, remarkably inventive universe with its own bizarre rituals and language. Ice Cream narrates the entire tale in an invented patois with an unusual cadence incorporating odd bits of French. VERDICT Though there is a risk of alienating the reader with a nearly 600-page book in a made-up lingo, and some of the plot twists strain credulity, the patient reader will be intrigued by the poetic prose and captivated by the exploits of Ice Cream Star. [See Prepub Alert, 8/18/14.]--Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.