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Today is the pub date for The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman. As if I needed further proof that I no longer have a working brain. I just started Wolf Hall when I could have started this. Sandra is a friend of mine, but that has nothing to do with it! End of the world novels are my favorite and pretty much all the reviews are unanimous, this is a mind-blowingly great addition to the genre. I’ll have to come back to Wolf Hall.
The Wall Street Journal: “Sandra Newman’s novel ‘The Country of Ice Cream Star’ makes the ‘Hunger Games’ seem Wimpy.”
From Booklist: “A richly detailed dystopian epic… This suspenseful, provocative tale is The Hunger Games meets Lord of the Flies and The Walking Dead, only much, much better.” (Starred review!)
The Guardian: “By the last page I was emotionally battered but euphoric: the book had held me so effectively hostage that I felt I had Stockholm syndrome.”
The Harvard Crimson: “The tale follows Ice Cream and Pasha through so many twists and turns and is packed with so much rich detail of their world that it is easy to become emotionally invested. The magnitude of that attachment, though, might not become apparent until the story’s ending unfolds in a spectacle of danger, betrayal, and—perhaps—redemption.”
From the A.V. Club: “This is a bleak and brutal book, but when one encounters a vision of this scale and originality, that must be respected.”
It’s impossible to find a bad picture of Sandra Newman. Here’s a great one by Charles Hopkinson, it’s from the Guardian review.
