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The Country of Ice Cream Star – Sandra Newman
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THE COUNTRY OF ICE CREAM STAR

Sandra Newman
BRAND NEW, PAPERBACK

RM16.00

A Fearless Young Heroine Embarks On A Dangerous & Surprising Journey To Save Her World In The Brilliantly Inventive Dystopian Thriller Fiction From Devastating Plague

Remarks Free Cover-Pages Wrapping
ISBN 9780099554653
Book Condition BRAND NEW
Format PAPERBACK
Publisher Vintage
Publication Date 02 Apr 2015
Pages 640
Weight 0.62 kg
Dimension 20 × 13 × 4.5 cm
Availability: 1 in stock

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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 aftermath of a devastating plague, a fearless young heroine embarks on a dangerous and surprising journey to save her world in this brilliantly inventive dystopian thriller, told in bold and fierce language, from a remarkable literary talent.


In the ruins of a future America, fifteen-year-old Ice Cream Star and her nomadic tribe live off of the detritus of a crumbled civilization. Theirs is a world of children; before reaching the age of twenty, they all die of a mysterious disease they call Posies—a plague that has killed for generations. There is no medicine, no treatment; only the mysterious rumor of a cure.
 
When her brother begins showing signs of the disease, Ice Cream Star sets off on a bold journey to find this cure. Led by a stranger, a captured prisoner named Pasha who becomes her devoted protector and friend, Ice Cream Star plunges into the unknown, risking her freedom and ultimately her life.
 
Traveling hundreds of miles across treacherous, unfamiliar territory, she will experience love, heartbreak, cruelty, terror, and betrayal, fighting with her whole heart and soul to protect the only world she has ever known.
 
Guardian First Book Award finalist Sandra Newman delivers an extraordinary post-apocalyptic literary epic as imaginative as The Passage and as linguistically ambitious as Cloud Atlas. Like Hushpuppy in The Beasts of the Southern Wild grown to adolescence in a landscape as dangerously unpredictable as that of Ready Player One, The Country of Ice Cream Star is a breathtaking work from a writer of rare and unconventional talent.
 
Details of what has beset our nation and our world come into focus slowly, and as they do the seriousness of Newman’s story becomes steadily more apparent. “The Country of Ice Cream Star” gradually builds toward a powerful, horrifying and beautifully written climax, one that’s epic in scope but also feels intensely personal.
 
It’s possible that this intrepid girl is the Frodo Baggins our times deserve. She certainly makes us confront the undeniable fact that the citizens of the future will be forced to repeat the history we’re making today.
 
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Kirkus Review :
 
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: “Simón 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 upon—is 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.

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