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My Summers and Winter in Antarctica
by Stephanie Krzywonos
A sweeping memoir of life in Antarctica, and pushing past the boundaries of the known world and your own limits.
Hungry for the sublime and haunted over her best friend's tragic death, Stephanie leaves her entire life behind to live in Antarctica as an ordinary worker and tests the limits of survival.
Over six polar summers and one astonishing winter, she encounters adorable penguins, colossal glaciers, and whiteout storms. In old explorers' huts, the traces of ghosts show the extremes to which people are willing to go to find peace. In this rare account of an Antarctic winter, the sun disappears for over four months, and Stephanie reckons with Antarctica's complicated past alongside her own grief and desire to live—all while auroras, the moon, sunrise, and darkness itself nourish her. Throughout, Stephanie also traces the stories of female, queer, and BIPOC explorers often left out of the annals of Antarctic history to ask:Who truly belongs in Antarctica, a place that has come to symbolize despair and hope in a rapidly warming planet? And in a wounded world filled with so much loss, is healing even possible?
An exquisite blend of memoir, history, criticism, and science, The Blue Hours illuminates hidden histories of life on "the Ice" and gives voice to the natives—seals and whales, ice and rock—that make up the extraordinary body of Antarctica herself.
"Antarctica feels reborn in these pages—unshackled from the tired myths of heroism that have long defined her, resounding with once-silenced voices, and ready for a new era of myth- and meaning-making. Kryzwonos accomplishes all of that with writing so haunting, formidable, and transportive that it's almost impossible to believe that this masterpiece of a book is her debut. This is a stunning book." —Ed Yong, New York Times bestselling author of An Immense World
"In The Blue Hours, Stephanie Krzywonos goes to Antarctica seeking salvation. What she discovers is that there is no geographic cure, only a geographic shift. Antarctica is not just a place; it is a force, and it's in relationship with her that Stephanie's life changes. Artfully woven and deftly constructed, The Blue Hours takes its rightful place on the shortlist of literary memoirs about Antarctica by women, and the even shorter list of works that reveal a queer, nonwhite, feminist perspective on the continent and its place in the human imaginary." —Gretchen Legler, author of Woodsqueer and On the Ice
This information about The Blue Hours was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Stephanie Krzywonos (she/her) is a Xicana writer who was born in California's Central Valley and grew up near the shores of Lake Michigan. She is the recipient of the Mae Fellowship, which supports women and non-binary debut authors; a grant from Vermont Studio Center; the Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholarship from Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference; and a scholarship and residency from Hedgebrook. In 2024, Elementals: Volume 4, Fire, a book of essays and poems she coedited, was published by Humans & Nature Press. Stephanie's essays have appeared in publications like Emergence Magazine, Sierra magazine, Dark Mountain, and more.
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