Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

⚖The case for it

Smilla carries this entire book on her back, and she proves more than equal to the weight. She is one of modern fiction's great difficult narrators, a half-Greenlandic woman whose command of snow becomes a quiet indictment of everything Denmark taught her about her own homeland. Her digging into a neighbor child's deadly fall keeps returning to how the empire treats those it swallowed, and that fury stays keen even as the story grows wilder and less plausible than it ought to. Plenty of readers lose patience with the later stretch; I never wavered, because she alone is reason enough to keep going.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Two thirds of a great novel. The Copenhagen investigation is superb; then Smilla boards the ship and the book turns into an action thriller, complete with a quasi-science-fiction detour, ending mid-thought on the ice. The genre swerve loses precisely the interiority that made her worth following.

— the honest librarian