The Country of Ice Cream Star

Kinda racist, ya know.

I'm not going to go into too much detail here other than to state that I really don't understand how anyone could enjoy this book. We picked this up for our Young Adult Bookclub, and NOT ONE of us could even muster up the strength to finish this book. Now normally, I'm not one for abandoning a book, but I just couldn't finish it. Somewhere around 400 pages in, I decided I'd had enough with the awful plot. Around the 400 page mark the plot takes an even stranger turn, and I just couldn't stick it out. THE PLOT MADE NO SENSE. Especially not in connection with Ice Cream Star's supposed main goal- to find a cure for the disease that causes everyone to die at an early age. Seriously- 400 pages in and they STILL weren't even close to actually working out a plan for finding this supposed cure- what was the whole point of the book?! The characters were completely unlikeable, I didn't feel an ounce of sympathy for Ice Cream Star- she shuns people for their mistakes and decisions whilst simultaneously making THE SAME mistakes and decisions. And there were many, MANY rape scenes in this book, all which had nothing to do with the plot, and were very uncomfortable to read. My bookclub and I all agreed that it seemed like the author couldn't think up a way to make nuanced characters, and decided to define quite a number of them by how badly they treated women, and how many women they raped. (And none of us could understand why Ice Cream Star would want to keep hooking up with "the King of the Rapists" as we referred to him. You shun your friend for shacking up with one of the rapists, and yet you continuously sleep with their rapist leader? What??) All in all, we agreed that this was a terrible book. And we tried oh so hard to get through it. One girl stopped at page 5 because she couldn't handle the writing style, and the others stopped around the 200 page mark. Only book in the history of our bookclub that none of us could finish.