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The Ice Cream Girls
Feb. 15th, 2020 09:12 amLast week, I went into my local charity shop and they had a special offer - £5 for as many books I you can carry. And it turns out I can carry 14 books!
I read the first one in three days - The Ice Cream Girls by Dorothy Koomson. Twenty years ago, Serena and Poppy were arrested for the murder of a male teacher. Poppy went to prison but Serena was found not guilty. Now, Poppy has been released and wants Serena to clear her name. It's one of those types of books that I generally end up skimming because I'm more interested in finding out what happens than in the narrative or the characters. But that didn't happen with this one, because it's well written and compelling. Both the women get first person perspective narrative threads, which adds a layer of intrigue as their stories conflict and you don't know if one or both are unreliable narrators.
The exploration of how the events leading up to the murder, the crime itself, and the subsequent twenty years have affected each of them differently is excellent. The flashbacks to how the teacher treated them are tough to read, but important to establishing the back story and unfortunately quite believable. What's interesting to me is that I felt sorry for both women, but I didn't actually like either of them, though I was still engaged by their story. It did start to get a bit repetitive in the second half, though, so I think it could easily have been 100 pages shorter and a much tighter story.
I did guess the twist, but I liked the way it was handled and how things worked out in the end for the two protagonists overall. Well written, interesting from a psychological point of view, and good enough in an of itself to prevent me skimming to get to the end.
I read the first one in three days - The Ice Cream Girls by Dorothy Koomson. Twenty years ago, Serena and Poppy were arrested for the murder of a male teacher. Poppy went to prison but Serena was found not guilty. Now, Poppy has been released and wants Serena to clear her name. It's one of those types of books that I generally end up skimming because I'm more interested in finding out what happens than in the narrative or the characters. But that didn't happen with this one, because it's well written and compelling. Both the women get first person perspective narrative threads, which adds a layer of intrigue as their stories conflict and you don't know if one or both are unreliable narrators.
The exploration of how the events leading up to the murder, the crime itself, and the subsequent twenty years have affected each of them differently is excellent. The flashbacks to how the teacher treated them are tough to read, but important to establishing the back story and unfortunately quite believable. What's interesting to me is that I felt sorry for both women, but I didn't actually like either of them, though I was still engaged by their story. It did start to get a bit repetitive in the second half, though, so I think it could easily have been 100 pages shorter and a much tighter story.
I did guess the twist, but I liked the way it was handled and how things worked out in the end for the two protagonists overall. Well written, interesting from a psychological point of view, and good enough in an of itself to prevent me skimming to get to the end.
