Reading In and Out

Ha ha! I finally have something to report!

Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint, vol. 2 by singNsong - This sat on my couch for a week, and I just kind of ignored it. When I finally did pick it up, I decided I really didn't care that much. So I returned it to the library unread.

The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman - I finally finished it! It took over a month! Well minus the week I was on vacation, so about a month. I've already said it was good, it was just really hard to read. To demonstrate why it was so hard to read, here is the first paragraph: "My name be Ice Cream Fifteen Star. My brother be Driver Eighteen Star, amd my ghost brother Mo-Jacques Five Star, dead when I myself was only six years old. Still my heart is rain for him, my brother dead of posies little. My mother and my grands and my great-grands been Sengle pure. Our people be a tarry night sort, and we skinny and long." The whole 580 pages was like that, with big pages and small margins. I found myself thinking in that crazy dialect.

The book had a 4-star rating in the bag until I got to the last chapter. After all the war and death and fighting over a cure for "posies" (the disease that apparently decimated the entire world, and created this post-apocalyptic chaos) Ice Cream hands herself over to the Russians to use as a pawn against the Europeans and ends up on a boat crossing the Atlantic. This is literally on page 579. On the very last page, it wraps up with a single paragraph that says something to the effect of "And that is how I saved my country and my people" and gives two sentences about what she did in Europe to procure the cure. There is a whole entire nother book there that could have been done. Hell, make it three books and cut this one down. It was a massive let-down.

Dammit! I just realized she wrote one of the books on my TBR: Julia, the retelling of 1984 from Julia's perspective. Maybe she has improved over the last 10 years.

So there you go. I am finally moving on from Ice Cream Star. Hooray!