The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Book Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

By Stieg Larsson

The world-wide phenom has hit my book shelf. And I have to admit: I’m hooked.

If you have been living in a cave and have not heard of this book, here’s a little sum-up of the synopsis:

From Publishers Weekly

Cases rarely come much colder than the decades-old disappearance of teen heiress Harriet Vanger from her family's remote island retreat north of Stockholm, nor do fiction debuts hotter than this European bestseller by muckraking Swedish journalist Larsson. At once a strikingly original thriller and a vivisection of Sweden's dirty not-so-little secrets (as suggested by its original title, Men Who Hate Women), this first of a trilogy introduces a provocatively odd couple: disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist, freshly sentenced to jail for libeling a shady businessman, and the multipierced and tattooed Lisbeth Salander, a feral but vulnerable superhacker. Hired by octogenarian industrialist Henrik Vanger, who wants to find out what happened to his beloved great-niece before he dies, the duo gradually uncover a festering morass of familial corruption—at the same time, Larsson skillfully bares some of the similar horrors that have left Salander such a marked woman.

I will be the first to admit that sometimes I’m a little impatient. So when a book starts off slow, I get a little perturbed. Now on that note, I will say that in the last ten years or so, there has only been one book that I have not been able to get through, and I have to admit, I have put it down to forever collect dust. (It was retched.)

I knew upon cracking the spine of this book for the first time (from fellow book wormers) that it was a slow start. I just didn’t expect the slow start to last half the book.

BUT! Once it got going, I couldn’t put it down. And as I said, I’m hooked on the trilogy. Book two is just sitting waiting for me to finish my current novel of the week, and I’m sure that it won’t disappoint.

                                                              

The two main characters in The Dragon Tattoo, Lisbeth and Mikael, were so wonderfully developed that you could immediately picture them your head. I really appreciated how Larsson gave you little snippets of intrigue into the characters that just whetted your appetite to find out more about these diverse characters. Larsson also did such a great job of describing an amazing Swedish landscape in this little remote town that you could vividly picture your two heroes running around trying to solve the mystery of the missing Harriet Vanger.  

I am hoping that the next two novels fill in a bit more about the mystery and secrets to Lisbeths past, as you know that there is some wicked history laying there waiting to be discovered.

Go pick it up. GO! Go NOW!!

Its a good one that hopefully sucks you into the story too!

Cheers!