Scan barcode
A review by tometrinket
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
It took me three attempts to start reading this book and I didn't finish it until this year. It's a very good mystery thriller and although half the book was not about 'the girl with the dragon tattoo', Lisbeth Salander stood out as one of the most intriguing characters I've encountered in anything I've read. But to get there, it took a while. Actually a long while. Roughly 200 pages to be exact.
It was around 200 pages that the story started to escalate in suspense and the story of Salander and Blomkvist starts to slowly combine into one. I'm not saying that Blomkvist's story isn't interesting. In fact, once I settled into it, I did found it entertaining in a quaint kind of way. The mystery in the background was just that, background noise until it hit the road running once Salander entered the case. And it was way nastier than I expected it to be. Well, I guess there were hints by how Salander's proper introduction began, it was quite nasty too.
It's not going to be an easy one to get through. And it requires patience because the set up was very extensive. Apart from the slow beginning, I also have another thing that affected my rating. There were two very tense incidents in the book, the first was Salander's proper intro and then the cellar scene towards the end. And in both the book jumped back and forth between Salander and Blomkvist's points of view in a rapid fire manner - almost movie like. I strongly dislike this method in movies to build suspense, I simply find it destroying the tension aka quite the opposite effect. And I found out that I hate jumping back and forth even more in books. Nonetheless, I'm think I will read the rest of the original trilogy but I think I might stop at that and skip the remainder of the series that wasn't written by Stieg Larsson.
It was around 200 pages that the story started to escalate in suspense and the story of Salander and Blomkvist starts to slowly combine into one. I'm not saying that Blomkvist's story isn't interesting. In fact, once I settled into it, I did found it entertaining in a quaint kind of way. The mystery in the background was just that, background noise until it hit the road running once Salander entered the case. And it was way nastier than I expected it to be. Well, I guess there were hints by how Salander's proper introduction began, it was quite nasty too.
It's not going to be an easy one to get through. And it requires patience because the set up was very extensive. Apart from the slow beginning, I also have another thing that affected my rating. There were two very tense incidents in the book, the first was Salander's proper intro and then the cellar scene towards the end. And in both the book jumped back and forth between Salander and Blomkvist's points of view in a rapid fire manner - almost movie like. I strongly dislike this method in movies to build suspense, I simply find it destroying the tension aka quite the opposite effect. And I found out that I hate jumping back and forth even more in books. Nonetheless, I'm think I will read the rest of the original trilogy but I think I might stop at that and skip the remainder of the series that wasn't written by Stieg Larsson.