“Because the world is small and their needs are immediate, Ice Cream and her fellow Sengles are happy. They hunt, play, thieve, and smoke, because little else needs doing. This simple life is reflected in their language. Technobabble and political jargon are absent from their vocabulary. They lack knowledge of history and literature, so the descriptions of events that transpire are immediate and grounded in the moment. Ice Cream uses nature and weather imagery to depict complex emotions like love and pain.”
“When children are the only ones who survive an apocalyptic event, the new world becomes more intimate, not more primal. Other authors might oversimplify this world and the child-protagonists as a result, but Newman manages to balance a youthful innocence and an inevitable worldliness that is often hackneyed or absent in other postapocalyptic and dystopian novels written in the last decade.”
“In The Country of Ice Cream Star, what looks like African child soldiers battling for supremacy in the northeastern United States is actually a beautifully nuanced meditation on the way that language is a manifestation of basic human concerns: hope, fear, love, and loss. By stripping away the ideologies that many contemporary readers feel choked by, this novel imagines a fresh look at what makes us human and how we express this humanity through language.”