num_pages: 274
description: By the time Blair Braverman was eighteen she had left her home in California moved to arctic Norway to learn to drive sled dogs and found work as a tour guide on a glacier in Alaska. Determined to carve out a life as a tough girla young woman who confronts danger without apologyshe slowly developed the strength and resilience the landscape demanded of her. By turns funny and sobering bold and tender Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube brilliantly recounts Bravermans adventures in Norway and Alaska. Settling into her new surroundings Braverman was often terrified that she would lose control of her dog team and crash her sled or be attacked by a polar bear or get lost on the tundra. Above all she worried that unlike the other gutsier people alongside her she wasnt cut out for life on the frontier. But no matter how out of place she felt one thing was clear: she was hooked on the North. On the brink of adulthood Braverman was determined to prove that her fears did not define herand so she resolved to embrace the wilderness and make it her own. Assured honest and lyrical Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube paints a powerful portrait of self-reliance in the face of extraordinary circumstance. Braverman endures physical exhaustion survives being buried alive in an ice cave and drives her dogs through a whiteout blizzard to escape crooked police. Through it all she grapples with love and violencenavigating a grievous relationship with a fellow musher and adapting to the expectations of her Norwegian neighborsas she negotiates the complex demands of being a young woman in a mans land.Weaving fast-paced adventure writing and ethnographic journalism with elegantly wrought reflections on identity Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube captures the triumphs and the perils of Bravermans journey to self-discovery and independence in a landscape that is as beautiful as it is unforgiving. 
language: None
title: Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North
publisher: Ecco