This is the book I'm reading right now. It is about a dystopian future United States of America in which a disease (called WAKS -- not sure what it is supposed to be) has killed all the adults and just left only children behind. The children only live until they're 18 or so and then die themselves of something called "posies" which exhibits itself in lesions and then weakens the person, sometimes making them confused or paranoid, and ultimately they die.
The protagonist's name is Ice Cream Star and at this point in the book, she has gone in search of a cure for the posies, because her 18 year old brother, who is the leader of her group, is succumbing to the disease and of course, everyone else she knows will soon die also. The world is a dangerous place -- there are different factions -- the Sengles, of which Ice Cream is a member, the Christings, who hold onto Christianity but do not practice it the way people do in our society, the Lowells, who live in a town and keep the town's infrastructure going -- they have electricity and houses to live in, but they don't share it with the other groups, although they do trade, and El Mayor, the leader of the Lowells, gave Ice Cream her horse, Money. The most dangerous of the people who still inhabit their territory are the roos (I think this might refer to Russians -- one of the roos that the Sengles captured gave Ice Cream a "Kalash" -- a gun that fires multiple times -- obviously a Kalashnikov, the Russian rifle).
The book is compelling reading and I am enjoying it a lot. It is written in a very strange way -- the writer has tried to explore how language might evolve in this new world. Obviously, it is not hundreds of years in the future, because they still find clothes and tins of food left from when everyone died of WAKS. The roo that Ice Cream captured has photographs of himself in some war but so far we don't know what war it is. So Ice Cream narrates in a kind of English, but the syntax is different and she uses lots of French words, like
enfant for babies, or little children, and
belle for beautiful. Here's an example of the language:
My name be Ice Cream Fifteen Star. My brother be Driver Eighteen Star, and 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. My brother Driver climb a tree with only hands, because our bones so light, our muscles fortey strong. We flee like a dragonfly over water, we fight like ten guns, and we be bell to see. Other children go deranged and unpredictable for our love.
I read some of it to Anthony and he said he thought the language would get very tiresome very quickly, but I'm not finding it that way. You get into the rhythm and it helps you focus on the time and place of the story. It is a long book (I am only halfway through after two days and I am a fast reader) but it really moves along and the characters are really interesting and I obviously want to find out what the cure for the posies is (if there is one) and whether Ice Cream will find it and who the roos are and what will happen to Ice Cream and El Mayor and Driver and Pasha Roo and Keeper and all the characters. I would recommend it if you want a really different reading experience and if you are interested in language (I am) and dystopian fiction.
