Ice Cream Castles: The Journals

Previously published as ICE CREAM CASTLES by DANIELLE M. RUNIONS.I knew how to ride by feel. Everything else had to be learned publicly.After a cotton-candy fire makes ordinary employment briefly unavailable, Danielle and Mara point Marcy-their Mercedes-toward a Maine ski mountain. They bring two dogs, a trailer named Richard, three snowboards, too little money, and the kind of confidence usually improved by information.Information remains scarce.What follows is a darkly funny American road memoir involving horses, highways, female friendship, strange jobs, injuries, disappearing companions, and consequences arriving faster than Marcy can contain them.Beneath the motion is a harder search: for Danielle's grandmother, for family, for the horses through which she first understood herself, and for a home not defined by the first person willing to claim her.Ice Cream Castles is a fast-moving literary memoir about identity, belonging, danger, humor, and learning that freedom is not the same thing as escape.She once believed freedom meant nobody could claim her. The road taught her to choose where she stood.