Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube

Blair Braverman is a self-proclaimed tough girl--able to drive a dogsled team, shear sheep, and survive a blizzard. Despite being from California, she longed for the Arctic and being a polar explorer. Braverman's performance is engaging, honest, and thoughtful as she recounts her quest to fulfill her dreams. Her voice glows with affection for an elderly shopkeeper in northern Norway. More chilling than the weather, though, is the abuse that Braverman faces as a woman in a man's world. Her suppressed feelings translate into an understated, slightly flat inflection when she describes regular sexual assaults by her boyfriend, Dan, who spins his actions as love. At the time, Braverman believes her experiences are no different from those of other women, and her true coming-of-age is rejecting that notion. A.B. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

May 9, 2016
Braverman’s search for personal fulfillment in some of the most unforgiving places on Earth, often behind a team of sled dogs, makes for a compelling if at times scattered debut memoir. Raised in California with childhood dreams of being a polar explorer, Braverman first visited Norway at age 10, cementing her desire to spend long periods in Scandinavia. A yearlong exchange program during her junior year in high school sends her not to the icy—and rural—north but to Norway’s more cosmopolitan south, to stay with a host family in Lillehammer. After high school, she returns to Norway to study dog-sledding, immersing herself in dog care and learning how to survive the endless night. This experience leads to a summer in an Alaskan dog tour company, Dog World. It’s still Norway that draws her in, and she finds herself most content working in the small northern village of Mortenhals, where she helps aging shopkeeper Arild with his general store and cobbled-together museum. Braverman often cuts too abruptly between her strands of memory, so it’s difficult to give each piece equal weight, but her easy, lyrical prose makes this search for identity and self a worthwhile read.

Starred review from May 15, 2016
A memoir of arctic adventure that goes deeper into self-discovery and finding a home."I've spent more than half my life pointed northward, trying to answer private questions about violence and belonging and cold," writes Braverman, a dog sledder and journalist whose frequent, extended visits to Norway and Alaska began from personal circumstances but soon assumed the significance of a quest to find a place where she belonged. Her journey from innocence to experience followed the map from south to north: "While southern Norwegians took pride in their restraint...northerners were loose and vulgar. They cursed, slurred their words, joked often about sex and death, and gauged time loosely." As a teenage foreign exchange student in Norway who later led dog sled teams for tourists in Alaska, Braverman was frequently tested by the male-dominated culture, wondering when jokes crossed the line into something more, whether she was experiencing harassment or it was just in her head. Though the narrative jumps back and forth, chronologically and geographically, the voice throughout remains as insightful and engaging as it is uncertain, from a young woman who is never quite certain if she is safe, not only from the climate, but from so-called civilization, and where danger might lie. "The thing was, nothing that had happened to me...was beyond the normal scope of what happened to women all the time. Some harassment by an authority figure, a few sexual remarks, pressure from an insistent boyfriend?" Yet her experience allowed her to recognize what had been wrong all along, as she found pleasure in sex where she didn't feel that pressure and fell in love of her own volition. Her external experiences are extraordinary in the frigid north that so few have experienced, but it's what happens internally that both sets this memoir apart and gives it universal resonance. Indelible characters, adventurous spirit, and acute psychological insight combine in this multilayered debut.

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June 1, 2016
Braverman grew up in California, until her father took a sabbatical when she was 10, and she discovered a geography she could not forget. She returned there in high school and, before and after two stints running tourists on dog sleds in Alaska, explored the remote reaches of northern Norway. This is not the place of minimalist furniture and the Nobel Peace Prize, she asserts, but rather the Norway of witchcraft, storytelling and incest. In languorous prose, she describes the people who cannot leave these northern places and delves into memories of uncomfortable sexual situations with Norwegians and, at the hands of her Alaskan boyfriend, the bewilderment of acquiescing to repeated date rape. Is this a memoir of the north or of being a woman who had both good and bad experiences in Arctic places? Readers will likely find that ice cubes are not the point, but rather the risky choices made while growing up and the struggles faced along the way.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)