The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo: Book Review

I’m out from work today having a root canal. Sounds like a lot of fun, doesn’t it? I decided to go ahead and write this book review so you all would have something to read even though I’m out of pocket today. See, I think of my readers first.

For a long while, I kept hearing about the Stieg Larsson Millennium Trilogy books and how great they were. I’m sure you’ve seen them in the bookstore where you shop. They always seem to be some of the first books when you walk in the door – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest. All of these books sounded so intriguing and the critics kept raving about how fabulous the books were; but I didn’t know anyone who had read any of them.

I had these books on my Amazon wish list for a long time but never bought them because the set I had on my list (hardback) was about $50. Then one day in January, the set was an Amazon gold box special and long story short, I got the set for around $10.

I started the first book in December and because of the holiday madness and my birthday and everything else going on, I didn’t do much reading until a couple of weeks ago when I finally had some time to actually sit down and read uninterrupted. As soon as I was able to do this, the book got GOOD! Those critics were right and I was so glad I stuck with the book rather than discarding it into an unread pile.

The plot is rather intricate and the first few chapters give a lot of background detail that is essential to the story but may seem quite boring when you are first reading. The story is about a hacker/detective (Salander) and a man (Blomkvist) who was convicted for libel against his enemy. Blomkvist is hired by another man (Vanger) who wants Blomkist to write his family’s memoir and in the process see if he can find out what happened to his young niece who is thought to have been murdered when she was 16.

Without giving too much away, Salander ends up helping Blomkvist in his investigation and they find out a lot more than they ever anticipated. There are so many twists and turns and my heart began racing while reading the story and I could not wait to find out what happened next. This book is definitely a thriller. Be warned though, there are some rather graphic sexual scenes in the book so if you are uncomfortable with reading that type of thing, then this may not be the book for you.

The book was made into a movie in Sweeden a few years ago and was remade by American director David Fincher and is set for release in the US in December of this year. I am so anxious to see this book on the big screen and hope against all hope that they do the book justice because more often than not, the book never plays out on the screen like it should in my mind.

I’ve already started on the second book and haven’t gotten very far. Since I’m helping teach class at church this quarter, I’m devoting a good majority of my free time to studying for that, but on my off weeks from teaching I am able to read a little more. If the second and third books are anything like the first, then I am definitely in for a treat.