My Dad read and enjoyed this book back in the mid 90s, I know this because not only did he lend me his copy (which I still have), but because the book mark he used is still inside printed with a competition with the closing date of 1995.
Knowing that I had enjoyed reading thrillers before, he had recommended this, but I never could 'get into it'. It's sat on various bookshelves ever since.
The current fashionability of Scandinavian crime fiction made me go looking for this book, the first to come to the UK and be successful.
Although I did finish it this time, it's taken a while and I'm still not convinced it lived up to all the hype. But it did keep me reading nonetheless.
I've always had a problem following story lines in which I'm unable to pronounce the names of the characters, I find myself skim reading the names and then can't work out what is going on. This certainly happened at points, as well as getting a bit lost in the plot half way through.
The story starts with the death of a young boy who lived next door to Miss Smilla, a death that the police believe is an accident, but which due to her feeling for snow, Miss Smilla knows was something more.
By the end of the book Smilla is running around on a ship in the Arctic, trying to work out where it is going and fighting with baddies!
I'm at a loss to see why the book won a crime novel literary prize, it's not so much a crime novel, as the story of a woman who is bored with life and has lost her way. The descriptions of the different types of snow and ice start off interesting, but after a while become almost overwhelming. The reasons and circumstances of the boys death become lost and irrelevant so that by the end I no longer cared. In fact I found the end to be rather abrupt and very unsatisfying - like Hoeg couldn't work out or decide where to go next, so just stopped.
Lent by (and subsequently inherited from) my father.
Mid December 2010 - 16 Jan 2011
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