Go ahead and add Sandra Newman’s supersize third novel, “The Country of Ice Cream Star,” to the growing list of books set in a catastrophic near future. Our current fascination with postindustrial wastelands makes perfect sense, of course, given the daily dire warnings about our planet’s fate. At least our literature appears to be responding to climate change even if our energy policy isn’t.

“The Country of Ice Cream Star” is in many ways a classic story, craftily retold and made contemporary. It adheres to a number of the devices that have enlivened many young adult franchises. A teenage girl named Ice Cream Star takes on a quest that exiles her from the Massa woods, a long journey to try to save her brother, Driver, from a fatal disease. “When my death come,” she bravely tells us, “I face this death. Got courage for my pain. But I ain’t strong to see my brother weak.”

Along the way, she meets a helper companion, Pasha Sleeper. She also falls in love, goes toe-to-toe with a deadly adversary and faces the expected series of trials great and small. The recognizable brand names — Patagonia, Pabst, Beef-a-roni — keep her tale grounded in our own world, but her adventures take place after some calamity has caused the breakdown of our government and social order, even the English language as we know it.

Newman is also the co-author of two literary guides, one of which is called “How Not to Write a Novel.” It’s her linguistic derring-do that distinguishes this new book from many of the traditional retellings of the hero’s or heroine’s journey. That might not be a good thing. The entire book is written in what we would think of as a patois, but is apparently the standard dialect of the future. At times, this can sound a bit like Jar Jar Binks narrating an audiobook of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”:

“First week of journey, we see children sometimes by the road. These always fleeing terrify, like we be deadly ghosts. Yo, at one town, the jones come out with guns. The only words they give be threats, if we ain’t leave direct. Come to comprehend, these be the raiding places of the Armies. All they known of strangers been their children robben in the night.”