Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Book Review Wednesday: The Millenium Trilogy by Steig Larsson

Alex's mom gave me The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when we went to visit her in CO in late July. Honestly, the cover of the book turned me off (I know, I know, don't judge a book by it's cover!) so I put it aside and didn't pick it up for a while. When I finally did pick it up, I found it a little hard to get into. The introduction seemed a little slow, the Swedish names and some references were hard to get. The author refers to the same characters by different names, which was confusing, and the descriptions of places, neighborhoods, etc, were hard to understand. I'm sure if I was Swedish, I none of these things would have troubled me. However, the book did contain a wonderfully delightful and interesting mystery. A couple, actually, that kept me interested, slogging through the slow introduction, getting to know the characters, and then I just fell in love with the book. It might have taken 150 pages or so, but after than I was fully committed. I couldn't put the book down, and I began to love the ridiculously long names of places and the character's penchant for sandwiches, no matter the time of day, their incessant drinking of coffee at all hours of the night, and their interesting and novel lives. None of the women in the novels were stereotypical. All were powerful (in one way or another) and none were yearning for a man in their lives (very little romance, but a lot of interesting relationships, which was refreshing). The protagonist, Mikael Blomkvist is an odd duck too. The books in the trilogy were stunningly good. Action packed adventure, mysterious happenings, interesting and novel plotlines. I just ate them up. I bought the second book in Jackson and I ordered the third not too long ago. I think I liked the first one the best, and the third one the least. But mostly, I just couldn't put them down. Intelligent and well written, involving government and corporate conspiracies as well as deep, dark secrets, I highly recommend these books.

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