Read Online Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North Audible Audio Edition Blair Braverman HarperAudio Books

Product details Audible Audiobook Listening Length 9 hours and 8 minutes Program Type Audiobook Version Unabridged Publisher HarperAudio Audible.com Release Date July 5, 2016 Whispersync for Voice Ready Language English, English ASIN B01F9NPRZ0

Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North Audible Audio Edition Blair Braverman HarperAudio Books Reviews

• I was blown away by this book, and I want to buy copies for all the awesome and brave (or hoping to be brave!) young people I know, female and male. Not that it's a book for younger people - I'm not one! - but Braverman's story, with all of its twists and turns, triumphs and losses, will inspire anyone who is afraid to get out there to get out there. One of the most satisfying and unexpected memoirs I've read in a long time, the prose is a captivating as the stories the author tells, and the far-away worlds she takes the reader to.
• After learning on Twitter that Braverman is a professional dog-sledder, I thought this was going to be about how she got into that, and her adventures learning and doing that.
  
  While a good deal of the book is indeed about that, the bulk of the book is somewhat of a coming-of-age story about her trips to Norway -- both to Lillehammer as an exchange student, and to small-town far north rural Norway in the Arctic circle. In all of these varying experiences, she grows in awareness and in relationship with certain unlikely characters. I think the highlights of the book are (1) the thrills of dog-sledding and (2) her growing trusted friendship with a small-town shop owner. As these two experiences occur in different locales, the book switches back and forth between them, while also detailing her personal relationship(s) back home in the U.S.
  
  Braverman was blessed to be able to pick up the Norwegian language and to speak it with accentless fluency from her teens onward. Life out on the remotest fjords of far-north arctic-circle Norway is quirky and somewhat backward, if not chauvinistic, but she soon fits right in and becomes part of the rural small-town scene. We are thus treated to a you-are-there viewpoint on these odd lives and stories, and on her life there both as an insider and an outsider. Although the narrative is occasionally repetitive, with the same characters sometimes running in the same grooves (as rural small-towners are often wont to do), by the end of the book the reader is greatly rewarded with a substantial emotional payoff for sticking with the story of this outlandish and unusual place. Do check it out ... and if it veers into unexpected territory, stick with it -- it's worth it.
• Braverman is an excellent writer, but reading this book reminded me of the scene in Bergman's The Seventh Seal when the knight rides over to a solitary figure in the distance to ask directions, finding instead that the figure is a corpse hanging in a metal cage. When his companion asks what the man said, he shakes his head. When asked if the man refused to say anything, the knight replies that the man was quite eloquent, but his message was bleak!
  3/4 through the book, impatient for it to start making sense, I realized that it reminded me quite strongly of Paul Bowles' novel, The Sheltering Sky, another expressive depiction of alienation and existential despair.
  Braverman, from a privileged background, keeps inserting herself into hypermasculine, "frozen north" type settings where she is mistreated by a series of louts whose bad behavior runs the gamut of offensive jokes, groping, and unwelcome sexual congress. However, at no time does Braverman object or put any limits on their unwanted behavior, which was totally confusing and inexplicable. It was almost as if she was in a fairytale and a cruel editor, or a demonic anthropology advisor had insisted on her offering herself as a sacrifice, and that she would not get her book deal, or complete her master's thesis, unless she was a passive, accepting audience for atavistic, predatory male behavior. Of course, this is ridiculous, she is not imprisoned in a fairy tale, but I found the content deeply unsatisfying, as her attitude and behavior really was never explained. It was clear that objectionable male behavior is a large part of the book's content, but this had no resolution. It would have made sense if at some point Braverman learns to keep herself out of harm's way, and perhaps an analysis of how our culture, or Norwegian culture, or a combination of family factors, etc. lead to her need for male attention and affirmation, her inability to discriminate between safe people, and dangerous people, and her concurrent powerlessness over her own body.
• I think the New York Times review of this book says it all, "As both a storyteller and a stylist, Braverman is remarkably skilled, with a keen sense of visceral detail...that borders on sublime." I could not put this book down and I have bought several copies for friends. Bold adventure, acute observation, and insights that are universally informative. This is a beautiful book.