Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

⚖The case for it

A Greenlandic-Danish woman investigates a child's death from a Copenhagen roof. Høeg uses the crime form to explore colonialism, indigenous epistemic authority, and Cold War Arctic violence. Smilla's knowledge of snow (technical, sensory, ancestral) is the novel's moral spine. A literary mystery of the first order, and among the very few crime novels taught in university literature departments.

— the canon

✕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 meteorite and a parasite, ending mid-thought on the ice. The genre swerve loses precisely the interiority that made her worth following.

— the honest librarian