Smilla's Sense of Snow presents one of the toughest heroines in modern
fiction. Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen is part Inuit, but she lives in
Copenhagen. She is thirty-seven, single, childless, moody, and she
refuses to fit in. Smilla's six-year-old Inuit neighbor, Isaiah, manages
only with a stubbornness that matches her own to befriend her. When
Isaiah falls off a roof and is killed, Smilla doesn't believe it's an
accident. She has seen his tracks in the snow, and she knows about snow.
She decides to investigate and discovers that even the police don't want
her to get involved. But opposition appeals to Smilla. As all of
Copenhagen settles down for a quiet Christmas, Smilla's investigation
takes her from a fervently religious accountant to a tough-talking
pathologist and an alcoholic shipping magnate and into the secret files
of the Danish company responsible for extracting most of Greenland's
mineral wealth - and finally onto a ship with an international cast of
villains bound for a mysterious mission on an uninhabitable island off
Greenland. To read Smilla's Sense of Snow is to be taken on a magical,
nerve-shattering journey - from the snow-covered streets of Copenhagen
to the awesome beauty of the Arctic ice caps. A mystery, a love story,
and an elegy for a vanishing way of life, Smilla's Sense of Snow is a
breathtaking achievement, an exceptional feat of storytelling.
