Smilla's Sense of Snow

My Denmark book around the world.

Probably closer to a 1.5, but I just can't. Full disclosure: I very much skimmed the last 20ish pages. The constant stuff about her being cold and that's supposed to make her deep and unique and the dialogue about her comparing some villain to a hallow teddy bear...I just can't. It was painful and this type of stuff was the focus of too much of this very long novel.

I liked the beginning, exploring her past, and her relationship with her father. I also liked learning about Denmark and Greenland and appreciate the insight into that but overall not the book for me.

I enjoyed this book not so much for its mystery/thriller aspect as for the main character, Smilla. Smilla is the daughter of a Danish father, a famed doctor, and a Greenlander mother, a hunter who disappeared at sea when Smilla was a child. She's now 37, lives in Denmark, has a strained relationship with her father, and is, in her own words “a bitter, old shrew.” She doesn't cultivate relationships with people, but to her surprise she makes a connection with a 6 year old boy from Greenland, Isaiah, who lives in her building with his alcoholic mother. When Isaiah dies by falling off the roof of their building, Smilla doesn't believe it's an accident. Smilla's Sense of Snow is the story of her doggedly pursuing the truth about what happened to him. Along the way, we get to know her backstory. She reads Euclid's Elements for enjoyment. She had a career as a scientist and a navigator. She ran away from her many boarding schools, and later never finished a degree at the graduate schools she attended. She puts people off with her focus on facts rather than emotions. She apparently has a “sense” for snow and ice, which is partly a lot of factual knowledge about snow and ice, but also is apparently a kind of intuition for its behavior. Smilla is a fascinating character, and I cheered her on throughout the novel.

I also enjoyed the portrayal of the colonial relationship between Denmark and Greenland, an integral part of the story, and something I didn't know about before.

The story as a thriller is convoluted and bound up in that colonial relationship. The number of details and the tenuous connections between them were a little hard to keep track of, but I was OK with all that until the end, when I was left disappointed and confused. I will be looking for someone to talk about the end with, hopefully to understand it better.