The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Stieg Larsson
After needing to take a visible step-down from his journalistic career, Mikael finds himself in the back of nowhere writing a family history and searching for a long gone relative. This progression takes most of the book, until a cat is finally beheaded.
I couldn’t work out what the main part of this novel was. Finding someone? Yes, ok. Saving a magazine? Yes, ok. Exposing some sort of crime? Yes, ok. Character development? Nope. Boring stuff about jobs that I didn’t care about? Oh, yes. None of the action happened in the first half. I wanted to love it, I really did.
Lisbeth was the saving grace for me, and the only reason I kept reading. The novel seems to be anout Mikael, but I would have been much more interested in Lisbeth’s badassness. Apparently this takes some more front and centre in the second novel.
What’s with the early temperature overkill? I was hoping he’d half freeze to death or something, with the amount of interest that was laid on those values, but nothing exciting happened. Also the timing of things. It’s not that important.
Almost 60k reviews on this one. People love it, hate it or feel ambivalent about it. It’s not like Harry Potter where practically everyone seems to love it.I wanted to play along with Mikael and find out who the killer/abductor/etc was. But with much of the evidence in the form of photos, I found it difficult to follow his leaps and bounds.
One of the problems I consistently have with novels with characters with tattoos, is that someone forgets to tell the cover artist how big they are! On my copy, the tattoo goes almost all the way down her back. On the version I’ve put here, the tattoo is tiny – just the way it is in the book. It’s not even that important!
It kept me reading – but it was so slow. Having invested so much time into this one, I’m not that keen to keep going. The payback wasn’t enough!I’m not immediately rushing out to buy the second book in the series, so I have a feeling this might be three stars from me. I’ve read much more graphic crime novels that have an even deeper layer of suspense and horror. Incest is the least of some of these crimes.
