Ice Cream - Softcover

Dunmore, Helen

3.58

219 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080214053X ISBN 13: 9780802140531

Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004

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Award-winning and New York Times Notable author of The Siege and A Spell for Winter, Helen Dunmore encapsulates, in her brilliant story collection Ice Cream, "how a single moment can change the course of a life . . . [the stories are] rich with regret, turmoil, and strained optimism" (Entertainment Weekly). Witty, stylish and evocative, Ice Cream is Helen Dunmore's astonishing new collection of stories, the first to be published in the United States. World-class storyteller Helen Dunmore explores friendship, regret and mysterious passions in stories crafted with subtlety, humor and a surprising tenderness. In each taut, agile tale, characters negotiate situations that are often both mundane and bizarre: a cafeteria cook confronts her Polish pen pal; a divorced mother gains insight from a parking meter; a beautiful, thin and famous woman succumbs to the lure of comfort food; a grieving husband says farewell to his wife; a boastful writer is put in his place in spectacular fashion; and in a chilling future, the government ruthlessly regulates conception and childbirth. In several stories a soulful, curious woman named Ulli takes up residence in the reader's imagination--stumbling across a strangely charismatic collector of religious icons, contemplating a youthful pregnancy, and remembering a troubled lover. In Ice Cream, Dunmore reveals both her poet's ear for the concise and piercing potentialities of language and the novelist's ambition of scope, proving her status as "a master of the shorter form" (The Sunday Telegraph).

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Review:

Helen Dunmore has been described as one of England's "most accomplished literary talents", a writer of extraordinary skill and scope (her third novel, A Spell of Winter, was awarded the Orange Prize for fiction in 1996). The 18 stories included in Ice Cream, Dunmore's second collection of short stories, represent a genuine diversity of viewpoint, period and theme. The opening story, "My Polish Teacher's Tie", is one of the strongest: "I wear a uniform, blue overall and white cap with the school logo on it. Part-time catering staff, that's me, �3.49 per hour." "Me" is Carla Carter, the dinner lady who, to the surprise of the "teachers"--the division between teachers and those who wait on them is keenly observed here--is going to strike up a friendship with a visiting Polish poet. It's a recurring theme: love, or friendship, that comes as a surprise to someone. In "Lilac", a young girl watches her cousin, Tommy, kissing his best friend, Henrik; in "Choosing", the unexpected kiss between two women transports two friends to a new, yet familiar, place: "How did they get here?" There are other surprises--some funny, some anxious--in these explorations of women's lives and experiences. "Leonardo, Michelangelo, SuperStork" is an unsettling vision of pregnancy in a world governed by the ruthless imposition of the ante-natal clinics and the "Genetic Code"; "TheKiwi-Fruit Arbour" explores the language of pregnancy--"Pregnant. Not pregnant. Mother-to-be. Young girl with her life in front of her"--through the eyes of a working-class teenage girl whose young lover comes from a "good" family.

Living up to Dunmore's reputation for originality, accessibility and flair, Ice Cream is a welcome addition to her fiction. --Vicky Lebeau

Review:

"Dunmore's carefully observed stories demonstrate her ear for language and her eye for the telling moment....Dunmore deftly uses narrative turning points to throw her characters into sharp relief."

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