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421 reviews for:
Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North
Blair Braverman
3.89 AVERAGE
421 reviews for:
Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North
Blair Braverman
3.89 AVERAGE
I first learned of Blair Braverman through a friend on Twitter, and began following her for her wry humor and love of dogs. I've read her shorter writings and enjoyed each and every one I read, so I asked for this book for Christmas.
I am not a huge nonfiction reader, and yet I could hardly put this book down. Of the stack of books I received for the holiday - including my standard fantasy and speculative fiction - this was the first one I reached for and opened and started reading and kept reading. Braverman is incredibly observant, and brutally honest, and these along with her beautiful prose make for a truly compelling read.
I expected a book about mushing, and dogs. Both are in here, along with so much more. I won't post any spoilers, but I will say that I highly recommend this book.
I am not a huge nonfiction reader, and yet I could hardly put this book down. Of the stack of books I received for the holiday - including my standard fantasy and speculative fiction - this was the first one I reached for and opened and started reading and kept reading. Braverman is incredibly observant, and brutally honest, and these along with her beautiful prose make for a truly compelling read.
I expected a book about mushing, and dogs. Both are in here, along with so much more. I won't post any spoilers, but I will say that I highly recommend this book.
This one was on my reading list for a while, and I’m so glad I finally read it. Braverman is a wonderful storyteller, writing of her time in Norway at a folk school, mushing dogs for tourists on a glacier in Alaska, and coming back to Norway to live and work for a time. Much of the book revolves around a need to prove herself—against the wilderness, against the men she encounters, and against the fear holding her back. It’s not terribly fast-paced, but it is certainly thought-provoking.
A solid memoir from an individual with a lot of joy and a lot of pain in her past, forging ahead in what has long been considered a man's setting and a man's world. TW for sexual assault.
There is a universality with which Blaire writes. Our stories on the surface are so different, but in reality, they so much more similar than I willing want to admit.
More stories about creepy Norwegian men than stories about dogs. Not bad, per se, but not at all what I expected.
adventurous
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
A lot of reviewers seem to feel that there is not enough dog sledding in this book, and I sort of agree. I picked up this book because of Braverman's Twitter presence, which is very funny and almost all dog sledding. This book is not that.
It's a book about trauma, and dealing with the aftermath of trauma. And figuring out that you have agency. I wasn't really prepared for the sexual and emotional abuse in it - it's well-written about, I just wasn't ready. I found myself really sad for the author, that she had no one protecting her, that she didn't know how to name what was happening to her or how to stop it immediately. And I thought about how common her experience is - how parts of it (not the details, but the experience of just eating shit and expecting nothing better) feel so familiar to my own experience.
I found the parts of her story set in rural Norway to be kind of charming and kind of boring, and the book itself doesn't hang together as well as I feel it should. I wanted it to be funnier, but it's her own lived experience so that seems like an unreasonable demand. I do think she's an engaging writer and want a silly book about dog sledding from her someday, please.
It's a book about trauma, and dealing with the aftermath of trauma. And figuring out that you have agency. I wasn't really prepared for the sexual and emotional abuse in it - it's well-written about, I just wasn't ready. I found myself really sad for the author, that she had no one protecting her, that she didn't know how to name what was happening to her or how to stop it immediately. And I thought about how common her experience is - how parts of it (not the details, but the experience of just eating shit and expecting nothing better) feel so familiar to my own experience.
I found the parts of her story set in rural Norway to be kind of charming and kind of boring, and the book itself doesn't hang together as well as I feel it should. I wanted it to be funnier, but it's her own lived experience so that seems like an unreasonable demand. I do think she's an engaging writer and want a silly book about dog sledding from her someday, please.
adventurous
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
Braverman is a wonderful storyteller. I knew her first from her tweet threads about her dogsled team, usually both humorous and poignant, and then from her thrilling novel Small Game. Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube is somewhere between the two and yet not what I expected. I'll admit I was taken aback by her forthrightness in sharing her emotional life, but it was never gratuitous. I appreciated the structure of the memoir, bouncing between her youth and young adulthood, her trips to Norway and her summers in Alaska.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual assault, Sexual harassment
This was not at all what I was expecting. After following Blair on social media for quite a while, I assumed her memoir would be about dog sled racing, but she only gets into that in the afterword. Instead, it's a coming of age story about a woman who, at a young age was drawn to the North, and had to face its many challenges - most significantly, the danger of men - in her determination to find her place in it.
Blair is a badass and an inspiration to anyone who wants to go after their dreams at whatever cost. I enjoyed the depiction of the Norwegian town that became her home away from home, the characters that passed through her life during that time and the way they interacted. However, I found the structure of events within the book to jump around too much for my personal preference. I wish I had felt more of her defiance, her strength of willpower against the things and people who tried their best to pull her from the path she knew she was destined to be on. Her mental toughness is incredible. Perhaps this book was her war cry, but I didn't quite hear it loud enough.