“
If you have even three dogs pulling, you can’t stop them if they don’t want to stop— and you can’t bail on the sled if you don’t want to be left alone in the wilderness without any of your gear.” —Blair Braverman ’11
Part memoir, part journalism, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube ranges the north, from Arctic Norway to Alaskan glaciers to northern Wisconsin, propelled by intimate details of Braverman’s coming of age. It’s a tale of girl power amid winter adventures: teenagers mushing through an all-night blizzard in Finland, guides keeping stranded tourists happy as conditions deteriorate on the ice in Alaska (an experience recounted on This American Life), and a sled careening through the Wisconsin woods behind a team of dogs that could easily pull a truck out of a ditch. But the book is also a probing look at the experience of a young woman coming to terms with sexuality and suffering abusive behavior and unwanted advances of men. In passages that are both honest and disturbing, Braverman explores the nuances and emotions, the doubt and shame of an adventurous and in some ways naïve high school girl struggling to understand the line between appropriate physical contact and sexual violence, especially in an unfamiliar environment. A large part of the book is journalistic cinéma vérité, chronicling life in Mortenhals, a Norwegian village of 40 souls north of the Arctic Circle. At its heart is a fond tribute to an older man, Arild, who provides a counterbalance to all the creeps and who offers space for the young American to, in fact, find “home in the great white north,” as the book’s subtitle avers.
COLBY Fall 2016
It’s material that Braverman has been working and reworking since her firstyear English composition course in 2007. And the lyrical quality of the writing elevates it stylistically. You don’t have to care about Arctic adventure, environmental wonders, or quirky Norwegian villages to find beauty in its pages.
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Braverman hopes enough readers will be entranced by her writing to finance her Blair Braverman ’11 behind her team of sled dogs led by Flame, left, and Donut. Braverman hopes her writing will finance a dog team for the Iditarod. Opposite page, at her farm in Wisconsin, Braverman chops frozen game meat (supplied by a local taxidermist) to feed to one of her dogs, who needed added sustenance while nursing a litter of pups.