The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Another book review by Jax!

Title: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Author: Stieg Larsson
Genre: Mystery Thriller
Overall Rating: 3.5 I want you all to know, that I struggled long and hard with what to rate this one.
The story is really about two extremely dissimilar people that (WHAT A CRAZY RANDOM HAPPENSTANCE) meet and work together to try to bring a murdering rapist to justice. One is Blomkivist, a somewhat nerdy but mostly good looking financial journalist. He's brave and loyal and true, and is based loosely on a kid's detective character. He's like Robert Langdon, but on his home turf (kinda) with various lovers wandering around.

The other is Lisbeth, who is, to paraphrase the book itself "a modern Pippi Longstocking". Now, you might read that and think, "That sounds cool, Pippi Longstocking was a annoyingly cheerful, but kinda cool. She had all that money and pigtails that stood up on their own."

Wrong. I mean, she is cool, but when I say modern, I mean Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition (and yes, that did warrant spelling out). As in, Lisbeth is punk-ish, anti-social and most likely has some sort of disorder that makes it nearly impossible for her to "normally" interact with people/the world around her. She's a hacker (the cool kind, not the Neo kind), and comes from a poor background but don't take no crap from nobody. No, really, one guy that tried got a car full of fire. While he was in it. Yep, she got a hint of the pyscho in her.

The thing is, you REALLY get into this girl's head. However hard it is for her to talk to the people in the book, you are TOTALLY there with her, every step of the way. She's an awesome character, and I think that Larsson does her justice. The action bits of the writing are spot on, and there is a point in the book where you just can't put it down.

But, and we all knew there was a but coming, you notice I don't talk much about the plot. That's because, for the life of me, I can't really remember what it entailed. And in the end, those two characters are far more important than any random plot. And that's what gives this book a less than 5 rating, is it's slow start (SO MUCH FINANCIAL JOURNALISM) and the way the plot gets kind of...lost. I think the main problem is the fact that Larsson got so very little edit time before he died. Yep, he died more or less right after the first "draft", and his books could have been near perfect with some time spent with someone who could have helped him edit. No disrespect to the man, he wrote a heck of a book, I'm just sad we never got to see his style refined and finished.

So the moral of the story is, you should read the book because the character is cool, but no one will judge you for skimming the first hundred pages or so. When I see the movie I'll you let you know how that goes, I have high hopes for it being all the best bits of the book.