Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoag

I have mixed thoughts on this book. First part of the book starts out strong – the reader is introduced to Smilla, a 37 year old recluse with a Greenlander background who is living in Denmark. We find that she is a leading authority in her field on ice and snow, but yet she does not work full time and scrapes by by living off of her father. Smilla has befriended a young boy named Isaiah, who one day she finds has thrown himself off a roof and died. Something moves her to start investigating his death, and in no short amount of time Smilla finds herself enmeshed in something that goes far, far, beyond a small boys death and leads right back to the shores of Greenland.

It’s in the second part of the book where I felt Smilla took on a second personality. First half she is strong, determined, and persistent as she doggedly tried to reason her way through Isaiah seemingly senseless death. In the second half of the book we find Smilla on a ship, with the crew thinking she is part of the police, heading for destinations unknown. Which is fine, but then the reader is finding out about tonnage, steel plate thickness, draft loaded and unloaded, lengths and widths of the ship, secret rooms, and the whole story seems to turn into a poor version of a action film. Smilla is getting beat up every time she opens her door, runs around the ship in the middle of the night, and she continues to makes a bad situation worse.

Does the ending pull everything together – yes, thankfully, it does. But I was losing interest fast and almost didn’t bother. What kept me reading was Smillia’s description of snow and ice, of the different kind of sea ice, of the different kind of snow, and how ice behaves. How the author conveyed those concepts was beautifully written and I even found myself bookmarking several passages such as this one:

It’s dense field ice, and at first everything is grey. The narrow channel broken by the Kronos is like a gutter of ashes. The ice floes – most of them as long as the ship – are like huge pieces of rock, slightly swollen and cracked by the cold. It’s a world of absolute lifelessness.

Then the sun drops beneath the cloud cover, like ignited gasoline.

I recommend this book with reservations.