Thanks so much to NetGalley for the free Kindle book. My review is voluntarily given, and my opinions are my own.

I'm not the biggest fan of memoirs, but I really loved this one. Picked it up more to see the maps and learn some new facts about Antarctica, but I loved every part of it.

The illustrations are amazing and would definitely recommend!

I really enjoyed Outer Space is Closer than Antarctica. This was a fun short read that included illustrations that I loved. Some of my favorite parts throughout where were the author would take specific Antarctic elements or science elements and parallel or relate them to her life experiences. I loved learning things about Antarctica that I didn't know.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

This book sells itself as both a memoir and a book about Antarctica and it doesn't do a good job of either... Not a book I would highly suggest unless you want to be confused.

This book has a lot of fascinating information about Antarctica. Unfortunately, it’s disorganized and buried amongst other information that I wasn’t too interested in. The author’s account about her “trip to nowhere,” how disconcerting it is to have perpetual sunlight or darkness, what they wear, how they get there and other accounts of daily life at McMurdo was great, but it was disorganized and hard to follow. I was super-interested in the information, so it didn’t’ matter much. My real problem was how much of the content is about the author’s personal life. I’m aware that this is how memoirs work but this is not a genre I enjoy, and I hoped that the information about Antarctica would offset the rest of the personal details. The illustrations were fun, but they’re not the same as photographs. Ott mentions how she took her camera, and those pictures would have been amazing. So, this read was entertaining but a little disappointing if you want to learn about the coldest continent. Memoir readers might enjoy it more. It was not for me.
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, NetGalley/Chronicle Books.

"Antarctica is a place of superlatives," writes Ott again and again. The biggest and the coldest and the iciest and so it goes. She made several months-long trips to the ice when she was younger, working janitorial and kitchen jobs not because those jobs were where her passions lay but because they let her, well, go to Antarctica.

This is something of a hybrid book: a memoir, but with perhaps a quarter or a third of the pages given over to illustrations. I can't really evaluate the illustrations, as I don't think they rendered properly in the advance copy that I read (leaving the black and white illustrations more or less intact but the more colorful ones with huge gaps), so I'm giving the book the benefit of the doubt and assuming that they'll make more sense in the final product.

The writing fell rather flat for me. I've been curious about Antarctica, and books about Antarctica, for *years*—since I was eleven or so, I think, sitting in the backseat of the car on a road trip while my mother read Anne Fadiman's "Ex Libris" aloud to us. Then there was Jerri Nielsen's "Ice Bound", which, my gosh, I *must* reread... In the early days of blogging, I remember following someone who was working a similarly unglamorous job to Ott's first jobs in Antarctica and writing about it, and even now I sometimes think that maybe it's not too late; maybe I could uproot my life for a year and be a janitor at the bottom of the world.

This kind of floats from topic to topic, though, unstructured (or: there is a structure, but not one that made for a linear story) and without a lot of strong feeling. (I'm sure the emotion was there in the writing, but it didn't translate to me as a reader.) And I always want the hard facts, the specific stories: what a day looked like, what a week looked like, what the dorm rooms looked like, what it felt like dressing to go outside in Antarctica, more people and personalities. I'm also not quite sure what to make of the "outer space" part of things, either; as Ott notes, *most* places are farther away than outer space, and when I realized that some of the satisfaction of a good title was lost.

So...rated solely on the written portion, a low three stars for me. Will presumably be improved with the published versions of the drawings within. Did make me dream anew about Antarctica, though.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an early copy of this book.

I really liked that the goal of the book was to link scientific research done in Antarctica to the author's stories, so it personalizes science so others will care about it.

I really liked the illustrations and wish there had been more. (I now realize that a few of the illustrations may have been missing from my copy since there were random blank pages.) Because of the illustrations, I would recommend a hard copy over an ebook.

Overall, it was a quick read, I enjoyed it, and learned some really cool things.

If this wasn't an arc, I probably would have dnfed. I was aware this was a memoir, but I expected more information about Antarctica and adventures there and less about the author's relationships, friends, coworkers, jobs and uninteresting anecdotes. The (in my opinion) pointless illustrations are also very minimalist, usually one or two colors with big words spread out over the page. Not quite what I was looking for, illustration or content wise. I did like learning about the slang and terms used in Antarctica though, even if it was from over twenty years ago.

This book was a delightful! If you've ever wondered about what it's like living in Antarctica, Ott wonderfully discusses living and working at American research station McMurdo! The book is filled with wonderful stories, statistics, and art about Antarctica. This book is accessible for non-scientists and scientists alike!

Her father’s early death caused her to fill every moment with something meaningful because he hadn’t had the chance. She had the life she wanted in New York’s art world, but felt anxious and dissatisfied, too weighed down to work on art projects. Traveling to Antarctica and experiencing the weather there is a test of human resilience.
Kind of a hodgepodge, as the author jumps around with whatever seems to occur to her to include. Lots of interesting tidbits, but some I wonder why she thought I’d want to know.

Michelle Ott has written a charming memoir ,she shares her time spent in Antartica first as a janitor then as a baker.While there she falls in love so this is a romantic stay also we learn scientific facts about this beautiful environment.Enchanced with charming drawings this was a delightful read.# NetGalley # chroniclebooks

This was a charming blend of memoir, science, and whimsical illustrations by an artist/photographer who spent four stints working in Antarctica washing dishes, keeping track of provisions, and making round cookies (approximately 24,000 in five months!). The morale-boosting effects of round cookies (as opposed to bar cookies made in a sheet pan) were mentioned on five separate occasions in this short volume, but after discovering how many Ott made while in Antarctica, I can see why she might be obsessed with this fact.

The memoir wasn’t written in chronological order but skipped around according to theme as Ott connected her personal stories to scientific themes. I think this worked well for this particular subject matter. Ott is adept at breaking down complex scientific facts into easily digestible illustrations. My only quibble with this book is that I would have liked more illustrations (and there well may be more in the published version since this was an ARC and there were definitely several pages that felt incomplete illustration-wise).

This was a quick, fun read and I even managed to learn a thing or two about weather, geology, topography, and space.

Outer Space is Closer Than Antarctica by Michelle Ott is a look at one woman’s journey on a quest for personal peace. Working in a high stress environment, Ott decided to spend a season working at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. She starts in the janitorial group but works her way up, a couple of seasons later, to baking, making round cookies for the staff because round makes them feel more homey than bar cookies. Ott is an artist and reflects on her personal life and work life with drawings of scientific things that occur in Antarctica. Not only is it a personal story but also a science lesson, as well,