A short story about a Japanese boy who has an infatuation with the sandwich lady at the local supermarket. Ms Ice Sandwich is shorter and simpler, but it’s a very convincing portrait of a lonely childhood and the confusing onrush of powerful feelings. The cookie is set by Facebook to show relevant advertisments to the users and measure and improve the advertisements. At the same time, the unnamed boy is struggling with the fact that his ailing grandmother is getting worse. The Japanese philosophy “mono no aware” (an appreciation of the beauty attached to the fragility of life) is a recurring theme in Japanese art and literature and this story is a great example of that.

Both the central boy and Tutti’s loneliness can be prescribed to a lack of parental care or involvement, their lives dominated not by their children or their duties as adults, but rather by the excesses of medias such as television and smartphones.The book focuses on a narrator who is obsessed with a lady who sells sandwiches from a stall in the local mall. But life has a way of interfering – there is his mother, forever distracted, who can tell the fortunes of women; his grandmother, silently dying, who listens to his heart; and his classmate, Tutti, no stranger to pain, who shares her private thrilling world with him. The author does not really spend any time weaving a mystery around the lady's face (something which I rather expected to happen), she chooses to focus on the boy's feelings and perceptions of the woman instead. Happy new year🎉🎄, my GR friends; I hope this year was gentle on you and that the new one brings you so many wonderful surprises 🎁. A summer love story that segues neatly toward a comical (and at times tragic) coming of age tale that offers a fine societal critique of adulthood in our times.

The writing in this book is really childish, but again the narrator is fourth grader, so it just works fine.

Are these the same Grandma’ he thinks, remembering all his fond memories of a lively Grandmother now close to death. It is here that the novel’s strength really lies as it takes the reader back to their own childhood, challenging them to confront their own youth through the author’s delightful and minimalistic style. He doesn’t admit that it’s because of what people are saying, but it seems likely that he was influenced by them.

The boy would like to tell Tutti about Ms Ice Sandwich, especially when other classmates make derogatory comments about her looks. Overall, Ms Ice Sandwich is a very heart-warming and quiet novella about growing up, first love, loss and learning to cope with all these new feelings which inundate kids at that age all of a sudden. Then when she finally takes my money and gives me the change and her eyelids turn upwards and I can see those great big eyes again, without any warning that squishy, yellowy, orangey stuff inside my head becomes extra bright, then that hollow place right under my chin, above my collarbone, feels like it’s being squeezed really tightly.Or discovering that someone might dislike a friend or that having a crush on a certain person would get you mocked by your peers. I remember those moments when something such as, say, when I discovered that a band I enjoyed listening to with my Dad was considered very uncool by older classmates I wanted to impress and the discomfort of trying to process contradictory feelings. However, the person our protagonist is most drawn to is 'Ms Ice Sandwich', the woman who prepares sandwiches at the counter in his local supermarket.

This is always a risky undertaking as sounding false will spoil the book no matter how good the plot is and trying to capture an adolescent train of thought is as elusive as trying to follow a story a child of that age tries to tell you (I have a ten year old, trust me). He is in awe of her aloofness, her skill at slipping sandwiches into bags, and, most electric of all, her ice-blue eyelids. We are also introduced to some other really interesting charachters such as Ms Ice Sandwhich and of course the loveable Tutti. This is the only refuge he has, for his emotionally distant mother, a medium, evinces little interest in his problems.In addition to certain standard Google cookies, reCAPTCHA sets a necessary cookie (_GRECAPTCHA) when executed for the purpose of providing its risk analysis. Wry, intimate and wonderfully skewed, Ms Ice Sandwich is a poignant depiction of the naivety and wisdom of youth, just as it is passing.