The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest (Millennium, Bk 3)
Author:
Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
Book Type: Hardcover
Author:
Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
Book Type: Hardcover
To those of you who aren't up to speed with Larsson's trilogy, I am going to try my best to avoid giving things away, but it's not going to be easy.
In the last book, The Girl Who Played With Fire, Lisbeth Salander-- portrayed as being worse than the Devil himself by media and police-- confronted her very real, very human, demons. In this book, she realizes that confronting them is not enough. She is going to have to destroy them. What goes against her grain is that she is forced to trust journalist Mikael Blomkvist, even to the point of letting him run large sections of the show.
This book even more than the previous two relies on intricate plotting and the pieces fitting together exactly. This book, more than the other two, showed unevenness and sections that needed a much sterner hand at editing. Because the plot was intricate, Larsson spent pages explaining various government agencies, how they were set up, the people they reported to, and so on. These were the sections of the book that made my eyes glaze over.
Another subplot involving Erika Berger, the former editor of Millennium magazine, although illustrating what many women have to deal with in male-dominated sections of the workforce, was really unnecessary and moved the focus away from the most fascinating characters: Salander and Blomkvist. Even Salander's trip to Gibraltar could have been shortened.
Any time the action moved away from that two-character focus, the book began to drag, which is why I feel that it would have benefited from stricter pruning. But was I greatly disappointed in the book? No. I had to see the outcome of Lisbeth Salander's story. Was she going to succeed? How was she going to succeed?
Larsson has given me a wonderful offbeat Dulcinea and her Don Quixote. I may always wonder what the books would have become if Larsson had been allowed to work on them himself, but the characters will always remain: a young woman who refused to accept that everyone else was more important than she, and the man who believed her.
In the last book, The Girl Who Played With Fire, Lisbeth Salander-- portrayed as being worse than the Devil himself by media and police-- confronted her very real, very human, demons. In this book, she realizes that confronting them is not enough. She is going to have to destroy them. What goes against her grain is that she is forced to trust journalist Mikael Blomkvist, even to the point of letting him run large sections of the show.
This book even more than the previous two relies on intricate plotting and the pieces fitting together exactly. This book, more than the other two, showed unevenness and sections that needed a much sterner hand at editing. Because the plot was intricate, Larsson spent pages explaining various government agencies, how they were set up, the people they reported to, and so on. These were the sections of the book that made my eyes glaze over.
Another subplot involving Erika Berger, the former editor of Millennium magazine, although illustrating what many women have to deal with in male-dominated sections of the workforce, was really unnecessary and moved the focus away from the most fascinating characters: Salander and Blomkvist. Even Salander's trip to Gibraltar could have been shortened.
Any time the action moved away from that two-character focus, the book began to drag, which is why I feel that it would have benefited from stricter pruning. But was I greatly disappointed in the book? No. I had to see the outcome of Lisbeth Salander's story. Was she going to succeed? How was she going to succeed?
Larsson has given me a wonderful offbeat Dulcinea and her Don Quixote. I may always wonder what the books would have become if Larsson had been allowed to work on them himself, but the characters will always remain: a young woman who refused to accept that everyone else was more important than she, and the man who believed her.
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