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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
adventurous
emotional
inspiring
medium-paced
I'd never read a memoir written by an invertebrate before, so that was a new experience. It was not an enjoyable one.
In all seriousness, I picked this up because I heard Braverman's interview about it on Fresh Air and it sounded really interesting. I enjoy books about isolation and survival, so this should've been a winner. Unfortunately Braverman's lack of spine frustrated the entire book. She did nothing to help herself, even when there was a clear course of action. If you want to wallow in being miserable, fine, but don't bore everyone else by writing about it.
Braverman also has a talent for ordering her thoughts in a twisted path that no one else can follow. One paragraph is about an experience when she was a teenager, and in the next the reader's snapped back to the present bonfire. I understand jumping about in time on a theme, but aside from spinelessness and cold temperatures, there is never a theme. How someone managed to not even be the main character in their own memoir is beyond me.
A nice tl;dr - if you're looking for a memoir about dogsledding, skip the entire book and just read the afterword.
In all seriousness, I picked this up because I heard Braverman's interview about it on Fresh Air and it sounded really interesting. I enjoy books about isolation and survival, so this should've been a winner. Unfortunately Braverman's lack of spine frustrated the entire book. She did nothing to help herself, even when there was a clear course of action. If you want to wallow in being miserable, fine, but don't bore everyone else by writing about it.
Braverman also has a talent for ordering her thoughts in a twisted path that no one else can follow. One paragraph is about an experience when she was a teenager, and in the next the reader's snapped back to the present bonfire. I understand jumping about in time on a theme, but aside from spinelessness and cold temperatures, there is never a theme. How someone managed to not even be the main character in their own memoir is beyond me.
A nice tl;dr - if you're looking for a memoir about dogsledding, skip the entire book and just read the afterword.
And it wasn't what I expected. She's a musher, so I thought it would be more about dog sledding. NOPE. It was basically a love letter to Norway. Which, fine, but Norway isn't even the Goddamn Ice Cube referenced in the title. It was OK. Not great.
I picked up this book for the Arctic adventure writing plus sled dogs, but it ended up being even more and better than that. It's about survival, determination and the beauty of frozen places, but it's also about what it's like to be a woman entering these historically male spaces, and how the author dealt with the metric ton of sexual harassment and intimidation she came across. It's also a slow-burn exploration of life in a small Norwegian town, and the lives of the people who pass through.
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
adventurous
reflective
medium-paced
adventurous
emotional
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
This was a really interesting read, but I honestly found it kind of dry. Based on the synopsis on the back of the book I thought there would be more focus on her dog sledding and I guess a little less focus on her getting there. But that's just my opinion. The last two chapters were probably my favorite, and really I wish the afterword had been the style of the whole book.
This book had some really interesting stories in it and Braverman is a compelling writer, but the way it was organized just really threw me. There are a lot of jumps back and forth between different times in her life and I wish it had been told in a more linear fashion.
adventurous
challenging
emotional
reflective
fast-paced