The Country of Ice Cream Star

This may be the most important book I've read all year. Simply because: the protagonist is a 15-year-old African American girl who fights through loss and adversity to save those she loves. Not enough books have this kind of heroine, and the author does a brilliant job of letting the characters reveal themselves over time, instead of giving blatant descriptions of race and physicality. In this dystopian novel, an illness has caused people to die by the ages of 18 or 20. The world, therefore, is run by children. The story is told by Ice Cream Star, and she introduces the reader to the other uniquely-named children in their nomadic band. Her older brother Driver is the leader of their people, but when Driver contracts the deadly illness which shadows their lives, Ice Cream becomes the leader, determined to find a cure. Standing loyally at her side is a man with pale skin and blue eyes - the type of strange person who is known as a "Roo" - and who knows more of the world beyond Ice Cream's people, possibly even where to find a cure. Along with her unlikely helper, Ice Cream is a brave warrior who tenderly watches out for the younger children in her care, calling them by age "my sixes" or "my tens". She is clever, compassionate, and continually thinks of others before herself. Because the world is run by children who die so young, this is a story of teens involved in sex and war, who must make their own rules about everything. I feel that the author deals with these topics in…

It was a very long time ago that I read A Clockwork Orange - but I recall glancing at the glossary, and it being very easy to read from there. This book is Much harder to get used to and the made up patois does not have a glossary. That said, it did get easier the farther I read, and all the words make sense if you pay attention to base words (Mal = bad, etc) or think of dropping a letter or so off of a word (Cember is December). It just may take several times of seeing a particular word before it clicks (I was embarrassed at how it took me 1/3 of the book to realize speaking Panish means Spanish, but once you think this way, it's easy and often obvious). So far as I could tell, there were no breaks in the patois language usage, and that's a huge feat of continuity in writing. This is set 80 years out from a pandemic (spoiler alert!) which seems to be very AIDS like ...' Posies' kills by age 20, so children and teens populate most of this book. Children have been having babies at 12 or 13, and dying off by 20 - lots of things get lost by the wayside in that circumstance, like language and many skills. Ice Cream Star is only 15, but that is an adult age in this setting. She is a strong heroine, and struggles to save her older brother and all of her hunting/warrior tribe from this fatal disease, once she learns that a cure exists and people can live to their 70s with treatment. Things that did seem off to me -- canned food is still good after 80 years? Moths decimate some…