Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg

Thus she can walk on a half frozen sea because she can see which ice patches will support her weight and which won't. Walking on Water: The title character has an almost psychic ability to read snow and ice.Race Lift: In the movie, Smilla is played by Julia Ormond, who definitely isn't Greenlandic.

Improvised Weapon: Several occurances, like the towel+ball bearing, and the two plastic scalpels taped together to make a more durable weapon.Halfway Plot Switch: Arguably used in this book, where a routine murder mystery trope dives off the deep-end into X-Files-esque killer bug from space about halfway through the novel.However, she is always described as a petite and delicate woman. When she is trapped on a ship with the vaguely psychopathic character Jakkelsen, she makes a weapon from a towel and a ball bearing, and injures him badly enough that he needs medical attention. When her father, a noted surgeon, tried to grab her and drag her home after she ran away at the age of twelve, she cut him with a scalpel she stole from the hospital she escaped from. She beat up a racist school bully much larger than her by finding out where he lived and ambushing him early in the morning, sending him to the hospital. Apparently she's been this way all her life.

She also forces her stepmother to listen to her demands by pinching her in the crotch and bending her pinky finger all the way back. And now Smilla Jaspersen is convinced she has uncovered a shattering crime. She lives in a world of numbers, science and memories-a dark, exotic stranger in a strange land. She stabs a man in the neck with a screwdriver when her tries to kidnap her, and topples a shelf onto a person she thinks is following her in the filing room of an office building. She thinks more highly of snow and ice than she does of love.

Combat Pragmatist: Smilla Jaspersen has a history of winning against people much bigger and stronger than her.

Tropes used in Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow include:

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg