SOURCE: "Fire and Ice," in New Statesman and Society, Vol. 6, No. 268, September 3, 1993, p. 41.

In the following review of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, Williams favorably discusses Høeg's protagonist and the novel's setting.

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow [is] a European literary sensation from Denmark written by Peter Høeg….

Miss Smilla's is 400 pages long and has a title that screams "dour Teutonic art movie of the 1970s, probably scripted by Peter Handke". And, sure enough, Miss Smilla has its longueurs (not to mention a plot straight out of the Michael Crichton school of scientific conspiracy thrillers). But it is still a very good book indeed.

Its strength lies in the remarkable skill with which Høeg has evoked his heroine and narrator, Smilla Jesperson. Half Dane, half Greenland Eskimo and an underemployed glaciologist, she lives on a bleak, white Copenhagen housing estate, and has frozen herself off...