Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

⚖The case for it

Smilla is half Greenlandic and half Danish and at home in neither, guarded and expert and funny in a way she never signals, and readers call her “my hands-down favourite fictional character.” The glaciology is the pleasure rather than the padding: snow types, ice physics, the specific ways a surface holds a footprint. Copenhagen’s cold and its class lines are load-bearing, and Denmark’s colonial hold on Greenland is substance rather than flavouring. The prose is “finely chiselled, patient, playful.” One reader calls the closing lines “perhaps the best final paragraph of any book I have ever read.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The investigation “gets bogged down in the middle two thirds” while corporate intrigue, smuggling, science and colonial politics queue for room the book does not have. Smilla gets access nobody would give her and powerful people let her keep going, so readers file her as “three parts frankly unbelievable heroine.” The prose turns on itself in places, “opaque slush: intricately convoluted, intermittently incomprehensible.” Once the story moves onto a ship, readers report losing the connection they had built and struggling with the nautical vocabulary. Key information then arrives by monologue rather than by discovery.

— the honest librarian

8h

honest hours

11

sittings