Review by New York Times Review
BLAIR BRAVERMAN WAS 10 years old the first time she traveled to Norway from her sunny hometown, Davis, Calif. The year her family lived in Oslo marked the beginning of Braverman's lifelong obsession with the culture of the cold, which soon had her devouring the tales of the Canadian writer and environmentalist Farley Mowat and dreaming of the Iditarod. When she returned to Norway as a high school exchange student six years later, however, she found that her childhood fantasies of polar adventure had not prepared her for the harsh, often cruel men she would encounter while pursuing it. After being repeatedly groped, taunted and criticized by the patriarch of her Norwegian host family, a man she called "Far" (father), the teenage Braverman lost faith that she could withstand the brutal realities of the land she once loved. "Far made me my own victim," she writes in her stunning and sharp first book, "Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube." "I doubted myself so violently that I split into two: the part that was afraid, and the part that blamed myself for my fear." No one would fault any young woman if, faced with such an abuse of trust, she set off for the tropics and found a different set of dreams. But, instead of hiding from her fears and self-doubts, Braverman goes back to Norway a few years later determined to purge the haunting memories of the past. At a rural folk school near the 69th parallel, she spends a year learning to drive sled dogs and surviving the icy darkness of the northern wild. In the village of Mortenhals, she befriends an aging shopkeeper named Arild and settles into the rhythms of Arctic life on the Malangen peninsula, where whale meat is still cherished as a delicacy and townspeople lament the decline of the sealing trade. Despite her obvious fondness for the place, Braverman never softens the jagged edges that make it unique. As she wryly points out, this is "the Norway of witchcraft, storytelling and incest, not minimalist furniture and the Nobel Peace Prize." At first, the physical dangers of the north - the rolling fog and blizzards and crevasses - are much easier for the author to surmount than the emotional ones. During college, she makes her way to Alaska for a job as a dog sledding guide, which requires her to spend the summers on a remote glacier accessible only by helicopter. There, too, she finds herself entangled with a man who refuses to accept the word "no." Her tumultuous relationship with him is not unlike the stark and unrelenting wilderness itself. "Those of us who lived on the glacier learned to expect nothing from the landscape, to adjust to its changes without question," she writes. "We no longer jumped at the gunshot crack of avalanches on a sun-warmed afternoon. Turquoise lakes a half-mile wide formed and vanished overnight.... The glacier was a closed cycle." AS BOTH A storyteller and a stylist, Braverman is remarkably skilled, with a keen sense of visceral detail ("The air smelled like bacon from the flies that sizzled in the overhead lights") that borders on sublime. But her ability to draw readers into heart-pounding action sequences - from the "perfect wave" of a sled dog team bounding across the snow to the disorienting rotor wash of tourist helicopters in a whiteout - is what makes the book so courageous and original as both a travel narrative and a memoir of self-discovery. Slowly, between trips back to Malangen to help Arild with his shop and the permanent base she builds in Wisconsin with her loving, patient partner, Quince, Braverman comes to understand that "adventure was a kind of violence, too" - one that could have broken her, but didn't. An emotional landscape more fraught with danger than the glaciers and crevasses. BRONWEN DICKEY is a contributing editor at The Oxford American and the author of "Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
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.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The most dangerous predators in the wild aren't the animals, warns Braverman (contributor, Best Women's Travel Writing). A self-described "tough girl," the author reveals how she delayed college to enroll in a traditional Norwegian folk school, where she learned dog sledding and wilderness techniques, along with 40 other teenagers. Obsessed with the North since childhood, Braverman worked as a tour guide in Alaska, where the male-dominated camp culture forced her into frightening sexual situations. She also spent time in Mortenhals, a small Norwegian village, helping an aging shopkeeper set up a local museum. Viewed with skepticism and amusement by the townsfolk, she eventually won their acceptance. The physical perils she faced-Would she be attacked by a polar bear? Lose control of the dogs? Get lost on the glacier?-were nowhere near as terrifying as the psychological challenges. An unforgettable journey through the heart and mind of an incredibly courageous woman. Verdict A real-life thriller combined with a remarkable coming-of-age tale, Braverman's memoir breathes life into the brutally harsh landscapes and her search for identity. An appealing read for fans of Jon Krakauer or Cheryl Strayed.-Susan Belsky, Oshkosh P.L., WI © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 restraintnortherners 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 mewas 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
