I finally got around to reading a book that predated the recent Scandinavian crime fiction boom. A Greenlandic woman (child of a stormy relationship between an Inuit hunter and a Danish medical entrepreneur) lives a depressing life in a depressing council flat in Copenhagen, called out of her cultural and spiritual impasse by the death of a Greenlandic boy who the police say fell to his death from a roof while playing. Smilla reads something else in the child's footprints left in the snow. This takes her on a quest to find out what's really going on, leading into a mix of conspiracy thriller, medical thriller, and philosophical rumination. I enjoyed Smilla's prickly intelligence and the contrast of cultures; didn't much enjoy the way things got stranger and more grandiose as we ventured into the icy world where the perspective of the Other gets entangled with 20th century meaning-through-conspiracy-thinking. I wanted a more grounded Inuit take on that sense of snow. In many ways, it's brilliant, though.