SOURCE: "Danger: Thin Ice," in The New York Review of Books, Vol XL, No. 19, November 18, 1993, p. 41.

In the following review of Smilla's Sense of Snow, Meyer, though praising Høeg's descriptions of Greenland, contends that many of the novel's characterizations are too undifferentiated.

Smilla's Sense of Snow, by the young and already much acclaimed Danish novelist Peter Hoeg, is a mystery story with heavy scientific undertones. The chief character and narrator is a half-Eskimo, half-Danish woman of thirty-seven, living in Copenhagen, a semi-voluntary exile haunted by her Greenland heritage and her memories of that strange and magical land. She is single, childless, a moody misfit. Her Eskimo mother, whom she adored, died beneath the Greenland ice, and she does not get on with her father, a distinguished Danish medico. She is on the side of the Greenland Eskimos against the Danes who have colonized them.

A six-year-old Eskimo...