There's a flow to it that I found soothing and dangerous, both - like slipping into a warm bath full of sharks. But honest to Burgess, I hear more Shakespeare in Ice Cream's cadence than I do anything else. I have almost never seen an equal to the beauty she finds in words here - the droog's Nadsat of A Clockwork Orange, maybe. And it doesn't suck (which is amazing), doesn't read weird or false (which is rare), and doesn't trip those alarms that signal artifice over art or verbal buffoonery over the natural sway and slide of the language as it grows. The voice Newman has created is bold and lyrical and, better still, complete - belonging to her pulp universe alone. Not a page, not a line, survives unmussed.
Would spank Harry Potter, steal his wand and send him on his way in tears.Īnd when I say the entire book, I mean the entire book. She would shame Tris Prior to her knees in a heartbeat. Is it an apocalypse story with a plague that has conveniently wiped out 80% of the population of the American Northeast (at least), leaving none behind but several generations of black children who all die before their 20th birthdays like some kind of freaked-up mashup of Logan's Run and that old Star Trek episode, "Miri?" Hell yes, it is.Īnd it stars a teenaged girl on a quest to save the world, who would make the perfect YA heroine if not for the fact that she is ten times the heroine of those found in any of the tales whose bones this one steals - and, thus, ten times as complex and ten times as real. Slavery? White colonialism? Religious fundamentalism? Check, check and double-check. Is it a book about black people and their experiences written by a white lady? Yep. People who care about books (and who care about seeming to care about books) are going to go nine kinds of bonkers over this thing because it presses just about every single big red button there is. I'm just scrappy that way.Īnd Sandra Newman's new novel The Country Of Ice Cream Star is going to cause some fights, cause some clamor among the finger-wagging ranks of the sensitive literati. Tell me it wasn't and I'll fight you, too. Tell me Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is the best modern American novel ever written and I'll fight you. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Country of Ice Cream Star Author Sandra Newman
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