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A review by imrehg
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
4.0
The morning light is coming and I've just finished the book after the whole night of charging through the second half. Confusing start, exhilarating middle and mild ending.
For a while I couldn't really figure out what was going on, because the story was jumping in all different directions and every character took several hours of (fictional time) to bring everyone new up to speed on some completely different story. When the characters settled into a sort of routine, things started to clear up to me in a very satisfying manner. Though got to say, just as Blomkvist, I still cannot really remember who was who in then Venger clan.
The middle section, mostly the murder mystery, was interesting and well thought out. Not sure if it could have been a little shorter, but that's partly personal taste.
The end, after the mystery is solved and we are back to the "adventure" part of the story, feels a bit lukewarm. It had to finish somehow, but everything was so well established that there wasn't any real surprise. It's a bit like the characters were on auto-pilot, one just had to "get that part done" to consider the book read.
All in all, it was a pretty good book and liked the protagonists a lot. They gave much more food for thought about human nature than the ones who committed the crimes they were investigating. They did surprise me with their reactions, but those were not out of character instead of enriching my views of them. I do have to ponder on Erika, Mikael and Lisbeth for a while.
By the way, this is the English translation, and some of the phrases felt... weird. It's not a bad translation, only minor things but enough to notice.
As an afterthought, with the confuse-excite-duh story evolution and the strong-willed protagonists, and probably because of all those corporations, this book somehow reminds me of [a:Ayn Rand|432|Ayn Rand|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1168729178p2/432.jpg]'s [b:Atlas Shrugged|662|Atlas Shrugged|Ayn Rand|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1157143422s/662.jpg|817219]. Not that the stories has anything in common, but they feel like book cousins.
Ps: I got caffeine poisoning just by reading how many cups they were drinking. But now, after the whole night, I need a cup too.
For a while I couldn't really figure out what was going on, because the story was jumping in all different directions and every character took several hours of (fictional time) to bring everyone new up to speed on some completely different story. When the characters settled into a sort of routine, things started to clear up to me in a very satisfying manner. Though got to say, just as Blomkvist, I still cannot really remember who was who in then Venger clan.
The middle section, mostly the murder mystery, was interesting and well thought out. Not sure if it could have been a little shorter, but that's partly personal taste.
The end, after the mystery is solved and we are back to the "adventure" part of the story, feels a bit lukewarm. It had to finish somehow, but everything was so well established that there wasn't any real surprise. It's a bit like the characters were on auto-pilot, one just had to "get that part done" to consider the book read.
All in all, it was a pretty good book and liked the protagonists a lot. They gave much more food for thought about human nature than the ones who committed the crimes they were investigating. They did surprise me with their reactions, but those were not out of character instead of enriching my views of them. I do have to ponder on Erika, Mikael and Lisbeth for a while.
By the way, this is the English translation, and some of the phrases felt... weird. It's not a bad translation, only minor things but enough to notice.
As an afterthought, with the confuse-excite-duh story evolution and the strong-willed protagonists, and probably because of all those corporations, this book somehow reminds me of [a:Ayn Rand|432|Ayn Rand|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1168729178p2/432.jpg]'s [b:Atlas Shrugged|662|Atlas Shrugged|Ayn Rand|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1157143422s/662.jpg|817219]. Not that the stories has anything in common, but they feel like book cousins.
Ps: I got caffeine poisoning just by reading how many cups they were drinking. But now, after the whole night, I need a cup too.