The Country Of Ice Cream Star

"This remains one of the most beautiful books I have read this year — the one I champion everywhere. It’s a challenging book (about rape and murder, slavery, white colonialism, religious fundamentalism, and a plague that has wiped out 80 percent of the population, leaving none behind but several generations of black children who all die before their 20th birthdays) and is written completely in a debased (but inarguably beautified) version of English, developed among isolated knots of survivors. Newman’s voice is powerful, and her protagonist, Ice Cream Star, would make the perfect YA heroine if not for the fact that she is 10 times the heroine in any of the tales whose bones this one steals."