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Beth Walz
5.0 out of 5 stars Great Adventures Stories Beautifully Written. Get it!
Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2012
The Ice Cave:

A Woman's Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic

By Lucy Jane Bledsoe

For anyone who loves an adventure story you really can't go wrong picking up The Ice Cave. Author Lucy Jane Bledsoe is an adventurous soul with insightfully raw emotions and a sharp pen from which to convey them. The book is a collection of essays that will take you, as the title suggests, from the heat of Mojave to the chill of Antarctica.

Bledsoe brings humor and history to her pieces as well as an insatiable spirit for life. But it's not all sugary-gooey, up, up and away happiness. Bledsoe does a great job of tackling the meaning and often meaninglessness of life and is painfully honest in recounting her internal and well as external adventures.

It is refreshing to read adventure stories from a woman's perspective, and Bledsoe has a sensitive not saccharine style. In her first essay, The Freedom Machine, she recounts her encounter with a brave woman on a bicycle fleeing her violent husband. In admiration she writes, "But she was, in fact making the journey. She was running away. She was claiming her own path and doing it with a bicycle. I envied her for her guts."

Like her other essays, the story of the escaping cyclist is emotional, inspirational and almost unbelievable. To her credit, although the confirmed adventurer, she offers the pivotal position of heroine to the other characters in her stories, and effectively makes people, even more than place, the focal point of her outlandish, yet true, tales.

The book is fun, sobering, entertaining, inspiring and well worth the money to read it. Get it.
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Lynn Harnett
4.0 out of 5 stars Exploring a personal relationship with wilderness
Reviewed in the United States on September 21, 2006
In this series of essays on one woman's relationship with wilderness and the world, Bledsoe explores fear, exhilaration and will as she bikes mountain tracks seeking mountain lions, encounters wolves in Alaska, wrestles with the lure of summits buried in unexpected snow.

Seeking a healing solitude she backpacks alone into the wilderness and finds the scariest animal of all - hunters with whiskey. She explores an intimate, harrowing fear in the Mojave, terrorized by mysterious lights. And faces her fear of water on a working/sailing vacation with her longtime lover.

While Bledsoe's evocation of nature and solitude is vivid and intense, the most involving essays are those exploring human conflict. Moments of high comedy run up against fear-born anger in Bledsoe's sailing tale. Expecting sun-drenched days on deck, she and Pat arrive to find the boat damaged by a storm, its gaff lashed to the deck. " `That's the gaff?' Surely a part that size was not optional." Island-hopping visions dissolve into days of backbreaking work and belly-clenching fear as storms batter the crippled craft.

The best essay - and the longest - is Bledsoe's account of her first trip to Antarctica. Curious and untutored, she has many narrow escapes, inspiring a friend to design a plaque reading "'No, Lucy, no!'" But she gets to see penguins and seals, spends a night in a self-built ice shelter and learns to love a place so inhospitable to humans death is just one small misstep away. (As she has since been back a couple of times since, readers will hope she is planning a longer book on Antarctica).

This is an honest - at times wrenchingly so - exploration of a personal relationship with wilderness, adrenaline and endorphins. Bledsoe combines adventure and physical effort with soul-searching and makes a sympathetic connection with the reader. This is a book for anyone who has wondered what people get out of extreme sport and for those who like a bit of human uncertainty with their armchair adventuring.

-- Portsmouth Herald
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