Review: The Ice Cream Lady, or, Something Evil This Way Comes
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 11 2, 2013
We read books knowing how they will end. We pretend we are surprised, but how many times does the bad guy win? Reading is a form of escape from reality, so maybe that's why the bad guys rarely, if ever, win. If I were a character in a book, I would never be the bad guy. You know the author is going to NUKE you somehow, just when it looks like you are finally going to get to rule the world.But this book is different...One look at the artwork on the cover confirms your suspicions that things are going to play out differently in this book. Our "hero" is going to be an anti-hero.Author John Meany takes on a distasteful topic, exploitation of a child. The child (the good guy) gets exploited by the bad guy. The bad guy does bad things in this book. How atypical is that? Let me repeat: Bad things happen to good people in this book. So automatically this book is a loser, because why should we waste our time when all we really want a book to do is entertain us?Maybe, just maybe, it's not a waste of time to read a book like this...Don't get me wrong. I'm saying that maybe the best time to deal with this issue, child exploitation, is before it happens. There are a ton of valuable insights in this book for the attentive reader. My maximum rating for this book is meant as an incentive to encourage readers to have the courage to deal with this issue while it is only a hypothetical, and not a reality for some innocent child...Reviewed by Thomas Jerome BakerAuthor ofStory Tellers: In Pursuit of Happiness