SOURCE: "Telltale Footprints in the Snow," in Manchester Guardian Weekly, Vol. 149, No. 19, November 7, 1993, p. 29.

In the following mixed review of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, Whiteside declares preference for the first half of the novel.

Famously, the Inuit people have an enormous number of words for different kinds of snow. The snow falling on little Isaiah's coffin, as Peter Hoeg's intriguing thriller [Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow] opens, is qanik—"big, almost weightless crystals falling in stacks and covering the ground with a layer of pulverised white frost"—and we have encountered many more by the conclusion. Isaiah, a child from Copenhagen's impoverished Greenlandic community, has been found dead, face down in snow after falling from a high building, leaving footprints on the roof that only those initiated into a snow-based culture might be able to read. Solitary Smilla Jaspersen can read them, and she isn't happy about...