This book was very poetically written, and a lot of the language was plain old gorgeous. I liked Smilla, by and large, and I especially enjoyed how the mechanic had the same first name as the author. (There was another mor minor character named Mr. Hoeg as well.)However, I had a lot of trouble with this book. Starting about halfway through I began having a really hard time following the plot. I don't know if I was just too distracted to catch on or what, but in the end I still wasn't entirely clear what was going on or why anybody was doing anything. What's more, I still don't really get what happened to Isaiah or what the deal with the meteor was. Maybe the author was trying to leave things open for a sequel, I don't know. Anyway, the writing was refreshing and I'm glad I read it, even if I did lose track of the plot along the way. ( )

I had heard alot of hype about this quirky, well-written mystery - unfortunately for me, it did not live up to the hype. It is mostly set in Copenhagen, with the latter portions revolving around an icy boat trip to a glacier. Smilla, our ballsy female protagonist, is a half-Inuit odd-ball of a woman, whose only passion appears to be the math and science behind ice and snow. One night she just happens to arrive on scene of what appears to be an accident where her 6 yr old neighbor has fallen from a roof to his death; she then involves herself in proving he was murdered.

It sounds interesting, but I just found most of it fairly dull. Alot of skipping around vaguely between pseudoscience, Smilla's childhood in Greenland, and lots of characters that seemed to blend together. Smilla was so odd as to be unrealistic - to me it was clear that a male was trying to write from a female character's perspective; it was somehow off. I really disliked the jarring present tense narration -- this just feels gimmicky to me and is very distracting. This was one of those books that you get stuck often reading the same sentence over and over again. Some of the prose regarding the ice and the science behind it, especially when they arrived on the glacier was really empiricly quite good though, and the cold forboding atmosphere on the ship was well-done. But in the end, the 'big reveals' seemed well, almost comical to me -- rather ridiculous - and not worth wading through the other #400 pages of the novel.

I can see why some people would like this - the author is clearly talented and intelligent, and maybe one could think of Smilla as edgy and the writing "hip," but to me it was not a well-crafted mystery as it was NOT a page-turner. It felt very contrived and I hate to say it but, pretentious as well. A generous 3 stars. ( )

An action-adventure-thriller with a lot material crammed into it. A great read, but not for the busy reader. The main mystery is refreshingly scientific and supported by a lot of bio- and geological detail. The plot is revealed very slowly and in short pieces -- I had to browse back and forth to keep track of all the clues. The writing is quite dense and the main storyline is interrupted by sociological analysis of the conflicts between Denmark and Greenland -- between nature (Eskimos) and a modern techno-society. I think that is the main theme in the book, it reappears in the dialogue and even the stucture of the book.

The book is very captivating and makes you think of a variety of things. It starts as a murder mystery, then slowly the action intensifies as the mystery and the stories of the characters are revealed.

In the first part, there are weirdly placed, random drops of mathematics, vaguely relating to the scene at hand. At some point, they cease to appear. ( )

When 6-year-old Isaiah Christianson falls of the roof of his apartment building and dies, Smilla Jasperson doesn't believe it's an accident and begins to investigate on her own. Conspiracies, drugs, glaciers, this book has it all. Smilla is an amazing character and the best part of the book. I thought the ending was bizarre and left too many loose ends just hanging there. ( )

The prose was sometimes difficult to follow, not sure if this was due to the translation. Some very unlikely scenarios. ( )