Some Book Recommendations

The book focuses on the author’s lifelong obsession with the arctic, which led her as a young woman to live in remote parts of Alaska and Norway and become a professional sled dog driver. Braverman’s writing is gorgeous, capturing authentic sparks of places and especially people with honesty and heart. What’s especially striking about the book, though, is how well she interleaves the unpredictable threats of subzero temperatures and mercurial weather with the dangers of being a woman alone in male-dominated places. The book is a coming-of-age story about learning to face both the challenges of a midnight blizzard cutting through a flimsy jacket and a leering dude with his hand on your thigh, or a toxic relationship as the only woman in a remote glacier camp. It’s a testament to Braverman’s craft at how seamlessly she weaves these threads together into a story of learning how to survive in harsh conditions. The beautiful and unlikely friendship at the heart of the book moved me to tears by the final pages, in part because it’s a far more satisfying conclusion than the “first to the pole” kind of victories this genre is so often filled with.

Her Silhouette struck me in part because I recently finished my own story about a complex queer relationship in a subterranean setting (based on how well Vy and I get on at cons, seems like a good example of “great minds think alike”). But its raw portrayal of those core relationships struck a chord with me: how complex love can be, let alone self-love; how difficult to navigate inner landscapes and come to terms with what (and who) you find in them. I love to see these kinds of complex inner worlds in my sci-fi: here they get to take center stage, and it’s glorious.

I read this book with a certain amount of guilt, because I wanted very much to see one of the final orbiter launches myself: as a graduate student at the time, I ultimately decided I just didn’t have the right combination of funds and flexible schedule to make it happen. Dean does a good job at making you feel like you were there anyway, capturing the surreality of launching the world’s most advanced vehicles from a swamp, or the camaraderie of a diner filling up with bleary-eyed space fans after an early morning launch. She also drives home what an unsung loss the end of the program was: how much expertise will be lost forever, how rare it might be for the political, cultural, and financial will to ever again come together for an achievement like this. There are tons of poignant little moments, like an oblivious hotel clerk saying “See you for the next one” as the author checks out for the final time, unaware the American manned space program has just ended. Reporting like this, capturing not only the facts of a pivotal moment but its emotional landscape — what it felt like to be there, wondering how history will remember it — is much needed, and Dean’s book provides a good record of this particular moment in the saga of human spaceflight.

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