A rich and revelatory memoir of a female confronting her fears and finding house 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 house in California, moved to Norway to understand how to travel sled canines, and worked being a tour information on the glacier in Alaska.

By converts funny and sobering, striking and soft, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube charts Blair’s try to turn into a “difficult female”-someone who courts danger so that they can become fearless. As she projects into a ruthless arctic panorama, Blair encounters down physical exhaustion-being buried alive in an glaciers cave, and driving a dogsled over the tundra through a whiteout blizzard to avoid corrupt police-and grapples with both like and violence as she negotiates the complex demands of being a young girl inside a man’s land.

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