Stieg Larsson - The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Millennium #1)

Mikael Blomkvist, a once-respected financial journalist, watches his professional life rapidly crumble around him. Prospects appear bleak until an unexpected (and unsettling) offer to resurrect his name is extended by an old-school titan of Swedish industry. The catch—and there's always a catch—is that Blomkvist must first spend a year researching a mysterious disappearance that has remained unsolved for nearly four decades. With few other options, he accepts and enlists the help of investigator Lisbeth Salander, a misunderstood genius with a cache of authority issues. Little is as it seems in Larsson's novel, but there is at least one constant: you really don't want to mess with the girl with the dragon tattoo.

This is a spoiler free review



More like 3.5 stars, actually.

I liked the characters and the mystery that evolved around each and every one of them, but all in all, there were just too many side-plots.

The main plot started after about 200 pages and ended about 100 pages before the end of the book - the mystery is solved, so why should I keep reading? The last part of the book is, in my opinion, totally skippable.

Nevertheless, the main plot was sensational. There were so many different characters that had Nazi trades, mysogynistic traits and just psychopathic traits that were interesting to read about and to discover. The main character, Mikael Blomkvist, is your typical good guy. He's not mysogynistic, he's not interested in money and he follows his ethics. At first I thought him to be too much of a cliché but then he evolved to be a respectable main character.

The other main character, Lisbeth Salander, was even more of a cliché at first and, sadly, remained so until the end of book one. There is a trope in YA literature where the protagonist is 'not like the other girls/boys and is well aware of it and doesn't care' and although this is an adult crime novel I found this to be irritating. Stieg Larsson writes about 1/3 of the book from her perspective, but we still don't get to know her and she remains a mystery to the reader. Yet her parts of the story have a charme to them that keep the reader interested in what is going to go on in the next book. Honestly, hadn't I read that the second book will be about her personal background, I probably wouldn't have picked it up in a long time.