Smilla’s Sense of Snow presents one of the toughest heroines in modern fiction. Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen is part Eskimo but she lives in Copenhagen and keeps to herself. When her six-year old neighbor is killed, Smilla doesn’t believe it was an accident and begins her own investigation of a case that even the police don’t want to get involved in.
Smilla Jeppersen, daughter of a Greenlandic mother and a Danish father, has never quite adjusted to life in Copenhagen. Raised in the skills of Arctic hunting and survival by her mother, Smilla spends her youth in North Greenland. At twelve she is moved to Copenhagen by her father, a wealthy and famous doctor. While Smilla has become a scientist, …
I read this years ago and loved it. I’ve recently been re-reading it and I like it even more. It works well on the surface as a thriller and detective novel, with the main character Smilla investigating the apparent accidental death of the son of her alcoholic neighbour.
What Peter Hoeg does brilliantly is to move from this small, local setting …
Not science fiction as the genre is commonly understood, but it still fits firmly within the overarching category. The greatest strength of the book is Smilla’s character. Høeg perfectly captures what it feels like to be an outsider: something that so many attempt and fail. I would go further and argue that Smilla did everything that The Girl with …
It took me a long, long time to read this book, because I had to keep going back and re-reading the beautiful passages. “I feel the same way about solitude as some people feel about the blessing of the church. It’s the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without the awareness that I am carrying out an act of mercy toward …
This was a great crime fiction nove. I loved the setting of Denmark and Greenland. Peter Hoeg has created a great character of Smila, a Greenlander, who understands and intuits ice and snow. She follows clues becasue she isn’t convinced that her little 6 year-old neighbor fell to his death from a rooftop. This is equistie, intelligent prose and …