Good, can't-put-it-down-adventure. ( )

there were absolutely little gems throughout this book, but overall it was just too much. too confusing, too convoluted, too tenuous, too verbose. i'm pretty confused about how popular this was, considering how it really doesn't fit into the thriller/suspense category, or the mystery category easily, and with its length and density i don't see it appealing to such a large number of people. definitely there were parts that were great, but mostly this was not what i'd hoped.

i did enjoy learning about greenland - i found myself looking up quite a bit when reading this. and thought this bit was quite surprising:
"Some years ago they measured the light at Siorapaluk in Greenland. From December to February, when the sun is gone. People imagine eternal night. But there are stars and the moon, and now and then the northern lights. And the snow. They registered the same amount of lumens as outside a medium-sized provincial town in Denmark."

"If you consider all the unpleasantness you encounter while you're alive, it seems improbable that it would all come to an end simply because you're dead." ( )

Liked it a lot, although it was a murder mystery/adventure kind of book which is not usually what I'm attracted to. It was long but moved along rapidly. Smilla was a really fun underdog hero type. ( )

If you love snow, ice, and a good thriller, don’t delay, read it now. A coworker recommended it to me almost 20 years ago when she found out I love snow. What I didn’t know about this novel is that there’s some ship action, too.

I wrote a blog post about it here: https://wildmoobooks.com/2018/02/14/peter-hoegs-smilla-more-than-just-snow-ice-t... ( )

I'm not familiar with the action/thriller genre so I don't know to what extent this book's preposterous plot is par for the course. We get Nazis, heroin, mummies, a dash of random BDSM, and much much more on our way to a finale with meteorites and killer worms possibly (it wasn't clear to me) from outer space. That sounds exciting in theory, but most of the book's 469 pages are devoted to lengthy descriptions of our indestructible heroine scurrying about first the streets of Copenhagen, then, for what seems like aeons, the Escher-like environment of a cargo ship on its way to Greenland. Along the way Smilla has lots of fights in which each blow is described precisely — at one point she's whacking a man repeatedly with a steel ball in a sock while he whacks back with a marlin spike, then next minute they're allies, chatting amiably on deck. In general, characters absorb quantities of physical punishment beyond the norm even of action films and video games.

Other than the descriptions of Smilla moving around and trading blows that would incapacitate anyone outside this book — each action sequence prefaced by a flashback to Smilla's quirky childhood, invariably concluding with a zenlike moral —, frequent reminders of the exact temperature, and detailed descriptions of the contents of every drawer, pocket, and shelf (always turned to lethal effect by Smilla), we get dialogue, much of which is baldly expository:

"...their problem was the ice. First they built a prototype of what was supposed to be the world's largest and most solid drilling platform, the Joint Venture Warrior, a product of glasnost and Home Rule, a cooperative venture between the United States, the Soviet Union, and Denmark's largest shipping company A. P. Møller..." (continues for 400 words)

— or clipped and elliptical with a mind to the movie adaptation.

Despite all this I was quite enjoying the book at first. There's nothing inherently annoying about Hoeg's prose and the mystery was intriguing. But the more we learn, the more ridiculous it all is. I mean, why exactly does Hviid want to haul this massive meteorite back to Denmark clandestinely? What does he plan to do with it, stash it in his basement and study the space-worms? Speaking of Hviid, he's a most unimpressive final boss, the least menacing of the various antagonists faced by our unfeasibly accomplished (deep knowledge of math, chemistry, physics, etc., author of a million scientific papers, world expert in all things ice-related despite flunking out of several schools) protagonist. In the end Hviid, and my interest in the book, simply melts away like the sad remains of a snowman on the first warm day of spring. ( )