Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North

A rich and revelatory memoir of a young woman confronting her fears and finding home in the North.

Blair Braverman fell in love with the North at an early age: By the time she was nineteen, she had left her home in California, moved to Norway to learn how to drive sled dogs, and worked as a tour guide on a glacier in Alaska.

By turns funny and sobering, bold and tender, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube charts Blair’s endeavor to become a “tough girl”—someone who courts danger in an attempt to become fearless. As she ventures into a ruthless arctic landscape, Blair faces down physical exhaustion—being buried alive in an ice cave, and driving a dogsled across the tundra through a whiteout blizzard in order to avoid corrupt police—and grapples with both love and violence as she negotiates the complex demands of being a young woman in a man’s land.

Brilliantly original and bracingly honest, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube captures the triumphs and the perils of the journey to self-discovery and independence in a landscape that is as beautiful as it is unforgiving.

Blair Braverman is a writer, dogsledder, and adventurer. She is the bestselling author of Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube, Dogs on the Trail, and Small Game, a contributing editor to Outside magazine, and a contributor to the New York Times, Vogue, This American Life, and elsewhere.