The Country of Ice Cream Star: A Novel
(Libby/OverDrive eBook, Kindle)

*Starred Review* In a future America, the population has been decimated by a mysterious disease, leaving only a few tribes governed by youths who dread the fatal sickness known as posies, which afflicts everyone by their late teens. Ice Cream Fifteen Star lives with her tribe of Sengles in Massa Woods, scavenging abandoned homes and hunting for survival. Their leader, Ice Cream's beloved brother, Driver Eighteen, is already showing posies symptoms. When the Sengles capture a roo (a fabled light-skinned foreigner), and Ice Cream learns that he's reached the unattainable age of 30, she secures his promise that he'll help her steal the cure from the roos. But when another roo is spotted nearby, Ice Cream's roo, Pasha, convinces Driver and El Mayor (leader of the industrious Lowells) that the roos are positioning for an invasion, and they must flee. The journey forces the Sengles and Lowells to navigate power, rebellion, and war among unfamiliar civilizations as Ice Cream struggles to secure the cure without sacrificing her humanity or the lives that depend on her. Ice Cream's story, related in patois, is a richly detailed dystopian epic that blends elements of American history, popular culture, and political allegory with romance and thriller pacing. This suspenseful, provocative tale is The Hunger Games meets Lord of the Flies and The Walking Dead, only much, much better. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Could this be the next big book to capture readers all across the age spectrum? Don't bet against it.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2014 Booklist

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. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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 (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A lesson from Thunderdome: Let there be no post-apocalyptic future without its mangled pidgin. Lifting a page from Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, with which it shares numerous similarities, Newman's (The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done, 2003, etc.) novel lands us in a decidedly unpretty near future. Its protagonist is a young woman named Ice Cream Fifteen Star, a member of a gang-cum-dynasty that migrated north from the "Chespea Water" into New England long ago but that now begins to form designs on its former stomping ground. The young folk of Ice Cream Fifteen Star's world are tough: "We flee like dragonfly over water," she tells us, "we fight like ten guns, and we be bell to see. Other children go deranged and unpredictable for our love." They're also susceptible to the reaper, who thins their number with a mysterious plague whose cure may just lie down south. The ones who survive the odds, in the social Darwinist world to come, are rather splendid, though: "Simn a child of middling height, with handsome looks of houndish sort. Bear himself peculiar straight, like all his muscles fix with hardness. Now he look tired rough, his face be scurfy with unsleep. Can see his age uponis twentyish in heaviness." Newman's story is inventive, her characters memorable, but her novel labors under the terrific weight of having to carry out that lingo of the future over nearly 600 pages and not drive the reader mad, in which she is only partly successful. (The passages in which more or less standard English figures stand out for their strangeness.) The other problem is a rather lax storyline; by the time the children arrive at their Planet of the Apes-ish destination ("Ya, be Arlington Cemetery, where all ancient soldiers bury, when it been America"), there's not much steam left. Praiseworthy for its solid efforts at worldbuilding but too long and diffuse to add much to the civilization-gone-awry library. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* In a future America, the population has been decimated by a mysterious disease, leaving only a few tribes governed by youths who dread the fatal sickness known as "posies," which afflicts everyone by their late teens. Ice Cream Fifteen Star lives with her tribe of Sengles in Massa Woods, scavenging abandoned homes and hunting for survival. Their leader, Ice Cream's beloved brother, Driver Eighteen, is already showing posies symptoms. When the Sengles capture a "roo" (a fabled light-skinned foreigner), and Ice Cream learns that he's reached the unattainable age of 30, she secures his promise that he'll help her steal the cure from the roos. But when another roo is spotted nearby, Ice Cream's roo, Pasha, convinces Driver and El Mayor (leader of the industrious Lowells) that the roos are positioning for an invasion, and they must flee. The journey forces the Sengles and Lowells to navigate power, rebellion, and war among unfamiliar civilizations as Ice Cream struggles to secure the cure without sacrificing her humanity or the lives that depend on her. Ice Cream's story, related in patois, is a richly detailed dystopian epic that blends elements of American history, popular culture, and political allegory with romance and thriller pacing. This suspenseful, provocative tale is The Hunger Games meets Lord of the Flies and The Walking Dead, only much, much better. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Could this be the next big book to capture readers all across the age spectrum? Don't bet against it. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

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.

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

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. (Feb.)