SOURCE: "Arctic Nights," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4720, September 17, 1993, p. 20.

In the following review of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, McCue discusses the style and themes of Høeg's work.

Every remove from safety makes us feel more reckless, abandoned. [In Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow,] Peter Høeg stretches the supply-lines of security so far that there seems no way back for the ice-maiden Smilla Jaspersen. She is a Greenlander, resettled in Denmark, which already makes her feel like a tightrope-walker "misunderstood by the person holding the rope". Forces which neither she nor the reader can fully comprehend propel her out into the arctic night, on an unregistered ship, on an illegal mission, with a press-gang of criminals, several of whom wish to kill her. In trying to find out what is going on, and why a young waif has died, she penetrates a forbidden part...