Character Study: Ice Cream Edition

In our column Character Study, we typically highlight certain attributes and tangible traits of some of our favourite ALU characters: the gold bikini of Bunny and Shark’s Bunny, for example, or Thomas from New Tab. But, given that this is summer, and it’s hot, and we take more ice cream breaks than we oughta, it takes little stretching of the imagination to picture what book characters might opt to scoop at their own local ice cream parlours. Follow along with our masochistic excuse to google pictures of ice cream, below.We find One Hundred Days of Rain’s narrator in the immediate wake of a painful divorce with her partner. Incessant rain pounds the Vancouver pavement, and so does she: in search of work, lodgings, food – all while trying her best to care for her young child.Breakups suck at the best of times: and instead of the traditional Häagen-Dazs, we think the narrator’s go-to might be London Fog, from Vancouver’s Earnest Ice Cream. Like the narrator, this flavour meditates on the weather, and deliciously so.Zan is one of those people who’s made the wrong joke at the wrong time: specifically, a suicide joke in an emergency ward. But the result of his being sent to a psychologist could be warranted, given Zan’s tendency towards misremembering – deliberately or not – the facts of his life.We think Zan would leave his Calgary digs to nearby Okotoks, AB, for Chinook Honey Company’s Honey and Saskatoon Ripple ice cream. Like him, it’s got a lot going on.A single mother with two kids living on a Reservation in Saskatchewan, Rose Okanese feels trapped in a bit of a cycle. She attempts to change her fortunes by entering in the reserve’s annual marathon, but she’ll have more than one contender – worldly and otherwise – to beat.Even still, we think that after twenty years of smoking and little exercise, Rose would probably have few qualms about sneaking a spoonful of Homestead Ice Cream’s famous Meewasin Mud – named after Saskatoon’s nearby Meewasin Valley.Kip Flynn is introduced to us terrified and maybe pregnant, reeling from the death of her boyfriend and clutching hush money she could not have helped but to take. But this does not last. As she embarks on a quest for revenge, she begins to become as at-same-times reactive and revolutionary as her Toronto environs.We think Kip would revel in her newfound salty personality with the equally salty Salty Toffee Caramel flavour from Toronto’s Lansdowne cone.This book of poems by Sky Gilbert is a travel memoir of sorts, recalling the author and playwright’s experiences on a summer spent in Montreal.Gilbert’s a hilarious guy, and we think he’d appreciate the cheekily-named Brou Ha Ha (that’s vanilla with caramel, brownie, toffee, and praline, for those keeping score) from Montreal’s adorable le Bilboquet.Hilda Porter, the “last of the Porters”, lives in fictional Brennan Siding, NB (loosely based on Keenan Siding, NB) with the few remaining born-and-bred Brennan Siding-ites. An elderly schoolteacher, she clings to the story of Trucanini, the last Tasmanian on earth.As Hilda’s chief passion looks over the entire country and Pacific Ocean to Tasmania, we figure that she doesn’t have a lot more room for farflung interest. Therefore, we think a classically North American vanilla milkshake from nearby Miramichi’s Park’s Dairy Bar would be right up her dreaming alley.