Ice Cream Castles Review

Ice Cream Castles is a short novel by Clarke Collins. Naomi is a woman in her late 40s who has given up on looking for love. Her boyfriend Ray had proposed to her, but then his wife showed up at her front door and ruined that relationship. Now, she focuses on running her frozen yogurt place Scoopy’s. When a rude customer comes in one day, she hopes that she never sees him again. But soon, Eli walks back into her life, and they start to talk to each other more. Soon, they find that they will be able to help each other in more ways than they could have originally dreamed of.

Usually I don’t go for age gap romances, and I didn’t think that this novel would be a romance at all when I first started it. Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised twice whilst reading. Not only is this age gap romance sweet, it is also so well-written that I couldn’t put it down.

Naomi is such a sad yet realistic character. She has had so many tragic things occur to her that she had just given up on having a happy life. She had resigned herself to simply going to work and coming home to an empty house, and she was trying to make herself okay with it. Then, Eli comes into her life. He has a fresh view of the world at only 30 years old, and he makes her see that things might not be over for her yet. She may have been able to get herself out of her rut without Eli’s help, but Eli definitely forced her to see the bright side of things more often. Naomi forced Eli to see people as people more often and to not overlook people simply because of where they work. Originally, I hated the character because he was so rude to Naomi, but I eventually warmed up to him.

Clarke Collins does an excellent job of discussing the intricacies of an interracial relationship in this romance novel. Their relationship is going to be more difficult because of the age difference, and people may judge them more because Eli is white and Naomi is black. They also come from almost completely different walks of life. But this book discusses how they overcome these adversities and get closer to each other rather than driving one another away.

I would recommend this book to anyone looking for an interracial adult romance novel.

I received a copy of this book and this is my voluntary review.

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5 books