Rating: 2.5/5 stars The Ice Cream Girls tells us the story of Serena Gorringe and Poppy Carlisle who have been accused of murdering their previous teacher and boyfriend Marcus Halnsley. The story is told from the perspective of both women and we're entering their story 20 years after he was killed. Poppy, who was convicted of murdering him, gets out of prison and with that the story of the two begins. We're given flashbacks of both women and their time with Marcus Halsnley, how he treated both teenagers and what he did to them. It's a story of physical, psychological and emotional abuse. Serena, age fifteen, is the first of the two he meets. He's her history teacher and is giving her private lessons so she will "reach her full potential" and get an A in class instead of the B's and C's she has gotten so far. After a few weeks he tells her he wants to care for her and touches her cheeck. Serena is completely smitten with him and falls him love with him, thinks she'll never find anyone she loves as much as him. But things get horrible really fast when he orders her around and when she doesn't do as he says he beats her and demeans her. At that point I asked myself why she didn't leave. Dorothy Koomson waited until almost the end of the book to explain more why Serena stayed with and even then it was still mostly avoided. Maybe it's because Serena is telling us and not a third-person narrator and she doesn't really know herself why she stayed with him. That bothered me, because I wanted to understand why someone would stay in a horrible situation like that and not leave. Same goes for Poppy. She first meets Marcus Halnsley in park when she is eating ice cream and she is completely fascinated by him, his looks and his honey voice. She goes to the park every day for weeks so she can see him again. When she comes upon him the second time they kiss and he is pervasively turned on by the fact that he was her first kiss. He drags her home with him, undresses her and she lies there motionless and let's him proceed as she's too scared until she tells him she doesn't want to do it. He gets incredibly mad, doesn't talk to her, drives her home and shouts at her to get out of his car. Poppy can't stop thinking about him, that she has to not make him mad, not to upset him so she goes back some weeks later, offering to let him sleep with her. It blew my mind in a bad bad way that she would even consider going back to him after how he behaved towards her and how he treated her simply because she refused to sleep with him. I understand that some women get completely smitten but she's talked to him twice, he's close to beating her and she wants to go back? You've got to be kidding me! I thought the story was written well until it got to that point. Maybe it sometimes happens but it seemed completely unbelievable to me. Dorothy Koomson explained in a letter at the end of the book about why she chose to write about it, the stories she heard but yet it seemed incomplete at times. Thankfully I can't put myself in either Serena's or Poppy's shoes and therefore will never know how they feel exactly and it's not as if their feelings weren't shown. They were. I understand that they were not just physically abused but emotionally and psychologically too. That definitely must have contribtued to them not being able to face their past and to not let any feelings from back then enter their bodies and minds, to block it all out. It seems odd to me that not once, just once, they surfaced and showed themselves to the women. By the end of the book I understand why they did what they did and why they had to do it. But that didn't necessarily make me feel all too sympathetic towards them. I felt sorry for what happened to them but I couldn't connect with them at all. I never fell madly in love with someone, I don't have children, etc so it was hard for me to get an understanding for those aspects of their lives and it wasn't conveyed well enough I guess. What was very well done were the flashbacks. The violence, the terror weren't overtly described (thankfully so) but you could feel the pain, the fear. You could clearly imagine what happened and it was scary, very scary. The biggest let-down of the book was the ending. I'm aware that not everything gets solved but it was too much of a coincidence that this specific person would be there that night. It felt like Dorothy Koomson didn't want any of the women to have actually murdered Marcus Halnsley (but having them believe that the other woman did it), not even by accident, so she swooped in another person who could and had done it. It didn't seem plausible to me. The ending was basically the reason why I decided to choose the two star and not three star rating even though it's more of a 2.5 star rating.