A Review of 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' by Stieg Larsson

"Mikael Blomkvist, a once-respected financial journalist, watches his professional life rapidly crumble around him.  Prospects appear bleak until an unexpected (and unsettling) offer to resurrect his n ame is extended by an old-school titan of Swedish industry.  The catch-- and there's always a catch-- is that Bomkvist must first spend a year researching a mysterious disappearance that has remained unsolved for nearly four decades.  With few other options, he accepts and enlists the help of investigator Lisbeth Salander, a misunderstood genius with a cache of authority issues.  Little is as it seems in Larsson's novel, but there is at least one constant: you really don't want to mess with the girl with the dragon tattoo."

I've tried to start this book two or three times before.  Now I've gotten through it, and boy, what a ride it was.

The beginning was the hardest for me to get through.  I've never been particularly interested in business or finances of any kind and I discovered, with the beginning of this book, that it makes me fall asleep reading about it.  I couldn't help but think, "Who on earth would want to be a financial journalist?  That sounds like the dullest job in the world."  But once they turned away from the finances of businesses and turned to the people running the businesses, things became a bit more interesting.  Scandals were being uncovered and cleverness was being used for evil.  So the moral of this paragraph is, get past the first hundred or so pages and then things will start to pick up.  The amount of detail in these first one hundred pages is a lot and it slows down the pace a lot, but it's all necessary, so soak it up.

I loved that this book has several distinct subplots.  I picked up on them and then agonized about how they would all fit together.  Once they did come together it was so cool-- I was fan-girling a little bit at the pure genius of it.  For the longest time I wasn't sure how they were going to fit Lisbeth into Blomkvist's story, but it ended up working out.

I'm still not sure how I feel about Lisbeth.  She's still an enigma wrapped in a mystery for me.  I'm hoping that in the next couple of books that more light will be shed on her.  I've picked up physical copies of 'The Girl Who Played With Fire' and 'The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest' so I'm excited to read those and continue the story, now that I'm sucked in and want more.

This book is good if you're looking for something heavier to read.  I don't think that it's a very good summer read though.  I read this over the summer and when I think of a summer read, it's usually something that's lighter in nature.  But I needed quite a bit of time to get through this book, so summer was my only option.

I give 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo':

Thanks for Reading!

--Jude