The Country of Ice Cream Star

by Sandra Newman

My name be Ice Cream Fifteen Star and this be the tale of how I bring the cure to all the Nighted States, save every poory children, short for life. Is how a city die for selfish love, and rise from this same smallness. Be how the new America begin, in wars against all hope – a country with no power in a world that hate its life. So been the faith I sworn, and it ain’t evils in no world nor cruelties in no red hell can change the vally heart of Ice Cream Star.

In the ruins of a future America, fifteen-year-old Ice Cream Star and her people survive by scavenging in the detritus of an abandoned civilization. Theirs is a world of children – by the time they reach twenty, each of them will die from a disease they call posies.
When her brother sickens, Ice Cream sets out on the trail of a cure, led by a stranger whose intentions remain unclear. It’s a quest that will lead her to love and heartbreak, to captivity and to a nation’s throne, and ultimately into a war that threatens to doom everyone she loves.

• ISBN10: 0701186429
• ISBN13: 9780701186425
• Publish Date: 19 June 2014 (first published 19 May 2014)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 15 July 2016
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Vintage Publishing
• Imprint: Chatto & Windus
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 640
• Language: English

Reviews

[Kim Deister]

The Country of Ice Cream Star The Country of Ice Cream Star came to me almost by accident.  The library on post hosted an event around Valentine's Day called Blind Date with a Book.  I chose one based on nothing more than a genre and a vague blurb.  And it was unlike anything I've ever read.
 
It is a post-apocalyptic, dystopian, young adult novel set in the future.  It takes place in the remains of what was once the United States.  But disease and war has left the country decimated.  The overwhelming population is black or Hispanic, and even this population is left with a crippling disease that leaves what's left of the country run by children.
 
The story was fantastic, filled with sometimes subtle messages about society and values.  Faith, or the lack of it, plays a huge role in how new micro-societies have been formed and how they are run.  There are shreds of recognizable faith from our own reality, but it has been changed by the experiences these children have gone through and by time.  Race, too, plays a pivotal role.  It highlights how assumptions about race can evolve into entire belief systems.
 
But the most distinctive aspect of this book is the patois.  This is what made the book almost magical to me.  The book was written in an evolved version of street language, peppered liberally with Russian and French derivations.  Not just the dialogue, but the entire book.  From a technical standpoint, this awes me because of the sheer creativity it takes to undertake such a thing, and to do it successfully.  And this is not a short book.  As a linguist, this got my juices flowing.
 
Is it difficult to read?  Yes, it can be.  Having the language background that I do probably helped a little because I recognized a lot of the root words as French and Russian and could translate those easily.  Sometimes it was the evolved English that gave me the most trouble, words that had developed over fictional time to be used in different ways, in different forms and contexts.  Nouns that are now verbs.  Verbs that have become nouns.  Even familiar places are made unfamiliar with the new language.
 
This patois is something that I've seen turn many readers away, but I urge you to give this a shot.  It probably does take a great deal more concentration to read it, but the story is well worth it.  And the concept is just so unique that the experience is fantastic.

[nannah]

I looked through the reviews to try to find a black woman's (or any black person's) opinion of this book. I can't believe there are only white women reading & reviewing this (not that I'm helping by adding to them)? It would have been really, really nice to have a diverse opinion and perspective - especially when most of the characters here aren't white.

Book content warnings:
- rape
- sexual harassment
- pedophilia
- slavery
- homophobia

The Country of Ice Cream Star is dystopian-like book about basically two groups of people, and two characters. The groups: the natives of the post-pandemic United States and the Russians. The characters: Ice Cream Star (our protagonist) and Pasha, a Russian deserter.

Ice Cream (a black girl, 15yo) lives in a world in which all white people have been killed by an illness called WAKS, or posies as she calls it. People of color aren't totally immune, either, as they die between the ages of seventeen through twenty. Ice Cream's brother is eighteen, and he's contracted posies. Heartbroken, Ice Cream will do anything to get a cure, even if it means joining a war against the "roos" (the white people - Russians), and teaming up with Pasha.

According to the book's acknowledgments, the 580-page book used to be 900 pages long in the first draft. This . . . makes a lot of sense, because the plot becomes so muddled and messy - and it ends up feeling like the author fell too much in love with her own world that she couldn't form a concise plot with a beginning, middle, and end. There was even a spot near the very end in which the MC, Ice Cream Star, has this inner dialogue that attempts to wrap things up but doesn't do a decent job of it. And how could a couple paragraphs tie together over 500 pages of meandering and clutter?

Okay. A couple things:
- This book has a really intense dialogue. It's the form of English that Ice Cream Star, her "Sengles", and many other people in her area of the post-pandemic United States use.
- This book does not end happily. Do Not Read If You Want A Happy Ending. I find this ending almost offensive, too, because wow, another black woman with another unhappy ending. Another black woman tricked & taken advantage of by a white man. I hate it. It's not ""edgy"", it's not "ambitious", like the quote on the cover says. We've all seen this story before. Enough in real life.

On to what I really wanted to talk about: racial issues.
In an interview with Sandra Newman, she said ". . . the book isn’t about race – or it’s only very occasionally, tangentially, about race. It just suddenly felt like a real world I had discovered, rather than an imaginary world I was inventing."

Okay, if you're a white author writing about people of color, your book is automatically about race, I'm sorry. Especially if you're writing about people of color and the issues they face because of racial issues. You don't get a free pass because it feels different to you suddenly.

Reading the first 100 pages, I was thinking this book was the most interesting thing I've ever read - in a good way. And then after that, I realized it became the most interesting book I've ever read in the worst, most racist, awful, disgusting way.

It's all written with the assumption that, given an apocalypse of some kind and without the guidance of "civilized white people", people of color (and especially black people) will revert back to simple and violent lifestyles where rape and murder are common/expected. In contrast, the white people in the story that we're exposed to have retained all of their technology, have a cure for posies, among other things. The characters of color take relics and images left over from our version of the United States as "ultimate truths", such as Jesus Must Be White. I don't know if that was supposed to be ironic? But it makes my mouth just taste sour. The Marias, also, leave me confused. If they're supposed to be latin@, why do they call themselves spaniels, etc.? Kind of shows how the author's writing from a white perspective, because I would think even years, decades, etc. after our current time, latin@s wouldn't want to be referred to as "Spanish", the name colonists gave them . . .

Sandra Newman really takes the racism up a notch during the last 3/4 of the book, when Pasha gets to his tragic backstory. He tells Ice Cream about the wars in an African country called Lagos, and the place is described literally as a place "God made in His days of hatred". There's literally so many awful descriptors for this Terrible place and the Africans who live there, like "Africans love torture" and she describes in detail how white people killed and tortured these children in Lagos. Lagos, Africa. Why does this need to be described in detail? Why does this need to be included? Why Africa, specifically?

There's also this awful story in Pasha's past that the main character sympathizes with - a bit spoilery so It's revealed he killed an entire (African) family in grief and also because he believed the mother was essentially "shameful" for having a child with him, and it resulting in their daughter's death. Ice Cream actually tries to form an excuse for him, and readers naturally sympathize with the MC, which makes me gag.

There's also some homophobic passages that are really tough to read. Even though Ice Cream comes around and with one sentence tells the one minor gay character she understands, it doesn't seem enough to make right the book's already printed homophobia. When Ice Cream finds out her best friend from youth is gay, she's horrified. It also leads to her commanding Pasha to kill her friend's lover - literally out of spite. There's also a line under a list of things American white people did bad in the "olden days": "whites had a bad religion where they worship paper money. Was mally churces callen banks, deciding all their laws. These whites live like diseases, all was homosexual selfish."

Reading this as a wlw just made me incredibly uncomfortable.

Another problem reading this is that I really loved Ice Cream Star and hated her character being tossed around by the plot and its characters. And the ending, especially that ending. If ever there was a more unsatisfactory ending than this . . .