Book Review: The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman

I honestly am not certain how to review The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman. I found it via Slate’s Underrated Books of 2015 list and saw that it was a YA dystopian novel. That’s perfect for me. Sara Goldsmith, who recommended it on Slate, thought that perhaps the reason it was underrated was the invented dialect in which people speak. I am here to tell you that is the number one reason to read the book.

The dialect is beautiful. It may take a few pages to really get into it, but once you do, it just seems perfect. I cannot tell you how many times, while reading it, I thought to myself “that be bone”. Once I was in the cadence and rhythm, it made perfect sense and really worked its way into my thought patterns.

Ice Cream Star herself is a very relatable character. She is kind and compassionate. She loves her family fiercely, but also loves all people in general. She hates violence and struggles in her world once violence becomes a reality, but she struggles through it and manages to keep her compassion which is also the source of her strength.

And while I am not a huge fan of the main female character who it turns out every male not related to her is in love with, I found it a little more palatable in this case given how few people remain in the world.

The secondary characters were also very well drawn. I liked the ones I was supposed to like and felt conflicted about the ones I was supposed to feel conflicted about. They all made sense in the world they were inhabiting.
And oh my goodness that world. Right after the dialect, the world building is reason number two to read this book. This is not The Hunger Games where you think “why would anyone actually put up with this” nor is it Divergent where you think “where are all the adults?” While I enjoyed both of those series, there were world building questions in each of them that you just had to put out of your mind to enjoy the story.

But story matters, and those were both excellent series because of the story. Story, sadly, is the weak spot of The Country of Ice Cream Star. This book is like a prequel, except that the story it is supposed to be a prequel to has not yet been written. Or maybe the better way to describe it is to think of the biographies that are “The Early Life of…”. When you see a book with that title, you know it is going to be the story of someone important from the time BEFORE they were important. In that book, you would learn the background of the famous person, perhaps see the foundations laid for how they became famous or achieved their important accomplishment, but you know you will not actually get to the important stuff. And that is what The Country of Ice Cream Star is.

We are told at both the very beginning and the very end that Ice Cream Star will bring “the cure” to her entire country. But this is not the story of that. This is the story of before that. The problem is “before that” does not really mean much without “that”.

This is a long book. The first third of it is very different from the last two thirds. In fact, as I was approaching the end of the first third, I thought I was approaching the end of the book. (I was reading it on a Kindle app that does not by default show progress.) I was really surprised when I hit the button to show me how much was left that I was only 30% of the way into the book.

Especially reading this right after Uprooted, which gets to the action so quickly, it was really disconcerting to realize that the entire first third of the book could have been cut. It was some world and character building, but it was not actually all that relevant to the rest of the book. And then I got to the end and realized that the whole book was just world and character building and I had not actually gotten the story of Ice Cream Star brought the cure to the Nighted States. Instead, I had gotten all the background to understand why it was Ice Cream Star that did it, but background was all it was.

So how to review this book? Absolutely read it for the dialect and the world building, but not for the story. Because this book is not the story that matters. It is only the setup.