Tuesday, October 26, 2010

[Book Review] THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO by Steig Larsson

Fiction/Suspense

Hollye of the Parkway Village Book Club reviews THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO by Stieg Larsson (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008)

This was a very intense novel with many characters and plots.

Mikael is a financial journalist from Sweden. He gets information about a corrupt man of finance, named Wennerström, from an old classmate as an anonymous tip. He then gets sued for libel and chooses to resign from his post at a prominent magazine called Millennium.

Mikael gets a phone call from a well-known man named Henrik Vanger, asking him to come and see him about a job. Henrik proceeds to tell Mikael about his niece who disappeared over 30 years ago. Henrik is obsessed with finding out who killed her and tells Mikael that he thinks one of his family members did it. He then hires Mikael to investigate his extremely-flawed family to see if he can discover what happened to his niece.

Mikael soon discovers that the Vanger family is seriously flawed and has many secrets. He hires Lisbeth, a researcher for a private detective office, to help him with this case. Lisbeth is thought to be mentally challenged because she was moved from home to home during her childhood and would refuse to answer any questions for a psychological exam. Actually, Lisbeth is brilliant and unconventional and has mysterious secrets of her own. They also discover some startling information about Wennerström along the way. The dynamic between Mikael and Lisbeth made the story a great one, in my opinion.

There is so much more to this book than what I was able to write in this review. The other members of my book club were torn. Some loved it, some didn’t. There did not seem to be an in-between on this. I want to warn people that the book is very slow and full of facts about Swedish industry for the first 80 pages or so, but once I got to the real story it was fast paced, shocking, character driven, and I couldn’t wait to see what happened next.

Hollye Ferguson, Parkway Village Library

The Parkway Village Book Club's next selection is Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer. The next book club meeting is Wednesday November 17, at 2:00 pm.

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Comments:
Though I thought it started off slowly, I enjoyed the book overall. A lot of it had to do with Lisbeth herself.
 
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