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.
This book was such a disappointment. All the exciting things promised in the blurb turned out to be completely predictable. The grand secret? Meh. I wasn’t that convinced that her dad had done anything wrong. It’s hard to cope with children, of any kind!
This book was actually enjoyable. I was hesitant. As I say though, Reed is from the people angle. After his son’s accident, he’s one of the people who have pushed forward from the ground up to make a difference in politics to change ordinary people’s lives. As a geneticist, this gets into all sorts of ethical ideas and messes, some of which are discussed here.
I’m not sure what I was expecting from this novel. I wanted something fantasy because I was sick of teenage drama. No fear here – a scrap of ‘isn’t she pretty’, but otherwise fantasy running wild. Very satisfying and light to read.
Whiplash! The ending took me completely by surprise. Phew! My head may have literally flipped backwards. I couldn’t believe it. I just had to keep reading, but in fact, it was in a course of a couple of pages that the whole thing ended up on its head.
Em had to kill to get her new position in the court. I wonder whether some people are looking down on her as having ‘cheated’, and in fact, some of the dialogue is about revenge and trying to hold down sensible ideas after killing people. It’s something I’ve been contemplating lately, with all the fiction I have been reading. It does sound like sometimes the easiest solution is to kill the figurehead!
This should have been called The Slow News Sisters instead of Keep Me Posted. What’s wrong with using a catchy term, even if it is later used in the novel? Not to mention it would have been a heads up for the progress being glacial.
What I loved was that the blending of fact and fiction made me feel at home in the novel. I didn’t object that I never really understood everything behind Lord’s motives. I didn’t mind that there was no happy ending.
When will I get tired of extreme-situation teenage novels? Maybe some time soon. I’m feeling an end of my sympathy for idiots that let love get in the way of all things! But real life problems? Yes, I’ll take those. This novel isn’t too far off course for things that could happen. Who knows how many people are having this problem, and it’s just not picked up?
You’d think that since I was up until 1am finishing this book (and doing some other writing) than means I enjoyed it. Honestly, I’m not sure that I did. There were huge time gaps and gaps in Jinhau’s memory that made me fall out of the novel time and time again.