Smillia’s Sense of Snow
Summary:
She thinks more highly of snow and ice than she does of love. She lives in a world of numbers, science and memories–a dark, exotic stranger in a strange land. And now Smilla Jaspersen is convinced she has uncovered a shattering crime…
It happened in the Copenhagen snow. A six-year-old boy, a Greenlander like Smilla, fell to his death from the top of his apartment building. While the boy’s body is still warm, the police pronounce his death an accident. But Smilla knows her young neighbor didn’t fall from the roof on his own. Soon she is following a path of clues as clear to her as footsteps in the snow. For her dead neighbor, and for herself, she must embark on a harrowing journey of lies, revelation and violence that will take her back to the world of ice and snow from which she comes, where an explosive secret waits beneath the ice….https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/81189/smillas-sense-of-snow-by-peter-hoeg/9780385315142/readers-guide/
Group Review/Comments
5 thumbs up
1 thumbs down
2 thumbs in the middle
Most of the group felt this novel long and unnecessarily complicated. “I slogged my way through it,” was a repeated comment and readers also described it as tedious with too many dense descriptions of minutia.
The one reader who enjoyed it talked about the scenery being weird and dreamlike and so absorbing that the reader forgets where she is going and gets lost along the way. Other readers described Smilia’s Sense of Snow as akin to reading a scientific journal. Some talked about the mystery being so-so, others talked about the real mystery being what the mystery was in the first place. One of the few positive comments was in reference to the way the split between cultures was portrayed. The cultural extremes and how they manifest in the characters was interesting.
