A review by vampfang
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

dark mysterious fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

i really liked the story and the mystery of it all, it kept me entertained and i always wanted to know what happened next. i didn’t really find the writing to be very good, however. none of the female characters seemed to be very well-developed. i feel like we definitely never got enough information about erika besides friend/lover of mikail and occasionally doing magazine things. cecelia’s motivations aren’t drawn out enough for the way she keeps changing her mind over and over to feel realistic or interesting. and while i did appreciate lisbeth a lot as a weird goth dude, i have a ton of problems with how she was written. it felt like an attempt to satisfy some sort of fantasy of a hot, mysterious woman finally opening herself up to a man. we only know she’s cool and mysterious and unknowable from the numerous descriptions we have of her unusual appearance, and the book repeatedly telling us how antisocial she is, even though she admits pretty early on into the book how she cares for her boss (and i think is attracted to him? which was unnecessary) and then again is supposedly uncharacteristically comfortable with mikail right after meeting him. we’re supposed to accept it as fact that she’s antisocial and hates people without any more development besides the fact that mikail wonders if she’s autistic. in my opinion she absolutely is autistic, by the way, and i think in some ways this is handled pretty well; while many people believe her to be stupid or violent due to how she ignores many social rules, our access to her perspective shows that this is not the case. she is intelligent, to the point where her skills are the key to one of the book’s great mysteries, badass, and, yes, attractive. i did feel that she was often really needy about her desire to be seen as attractive or not a “freak.” while this wasn’t necessarily unrealistic, it felt a bit out of character for this supposedly detached girl to lament her small boobs and photographic memory for validation from a sex partner she barely knows. i also didn’t really get the appeal of mikail anyway. the book went out of its way to show that while she did have sex with women, she REALLY liked sex with men, which felt like more of a lesbian fetish instead of bisexual representation. for all its weak female characters, the book still makes such an effort to Say Something about violence against women—violence that women themselves are actually acutely aware of. lisbeth being consistently surprised about men hating women, at 24 years of age, also felt really strange. it feels more like the author is only just now realizing how bad violence against women is, and by including statistics about how often women are raped and featuring sexual violence prominently throughout the book he is saying something profound even though he isn’t. the mystery was good tho. i didn’t understand any of the business stuff. lisbeth should’ve been a lesbian. i also don’t think she needed a sexual relationship with mikail at all, it would’ve been even more satisfying to see her have a real friend for the first time.
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