Word: smilla
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...TITLE: SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW...
That's the antiestablishment view of Hoeg's heroine, Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen, a woman caught between the native Greenland culture of her mother, a hunter and tracker, and the comfortable wealth of her Danish father, a physician and scientist. Smilla knows both science and snow, but she is too rebellious to work regularly for the ruling Danes. She is at loose ends in Copenhagen when a six-year-old Eskimo boy she has befriended slips from the snowy roof of their apartment house and is killed. An accident, of course; but the boy, Smilla knows, wouldn't normally have been...
...killed a harmless boy? Come to think of it, where does his alcoholic mother get her money? Smilla begins to poke into a mystery that no one else acknowledges. Answers disappear in the gray, corporate fog that surrounds a great mining conglomerate. The police warn her roughly to stop annoying important citizens. She is befriended -- Why? Simply because she's good- looking? -- by a hulking, silent man, a mechanic, who seems to have had a violent past...
...storyteller's ancient, changeless pattern develops, working as well in Denmark and Greenland as it did for Ross Macdonald in his Lew Archer novels of darkest California and for Martin Cruz Smith and the series that began with Gorky Park in Moscow. Smilla puts her nose in harm's way and gets it bloodied. Like Archer and like Smith's Russian cop Arkady Renko, she keeps on poking. She's in peril in a glossy casino near Copenhagen, on a powerful, mysteriously equipped icebreaker plowing north toward Greenland, on the floating metal atoll of a huge fueling dock, and finally...