Book Review The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Title: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Author: Stieg Larsson

Release Date: June 23, 2009

Goodreads Synopsis: “A spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue.

It’s about the disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden . . . and about her octogenarian uncle, determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder.

It’s about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get to the bottom of Harriet’s disappearance . . . and about Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age—and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness to go with it—who assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialism—and an unexpected connection between themselves.

It’s a contagiously exciting, stunningly intelligent novel about society at its most hidden, and about the intimate lives of a brilliantly realized cast of characters, all of them forced to face the darker aspects of their world and of their own lives.”

My Review: So I am in a book club and whoever is hosting the club that month gets to pick the book we read, which is why this book looks different then my normal picks on this blog.  Well, this month my book club went with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  Now, I love watching Law and Order and I love mysteries, I used to read them all the time, all time favorite And Then There Were None by Agatha Cristie (which if you like mysteries and haven’t read this do it!)  so when this was recommended it sounded like it was right up my ally.  I started reading the book and right away I had a really hard time getting into it, I felt like everything was almost over described and I found my mind wandering away from the story.

I have also learned from my friend Rebecca aka  The Book Lady’s Blog, about the rule of 100, if I don’t like a book 100 pages in, stop reading it.  I have way to many books on my “to read” list to finish a book that I don’t even really like, do you know what I mean?  However, this book has gotten so many rave reviews that I tried to push through.  One of the things that made that difficult though was the way the book was translated, it was originally written in Swedish and I could tell that some of the phrases did not translate over very well and I got a little frustrated with that.  I also found it a little strange that all these women were just throwing themselves at Mikael, that just does not happen in real life and I had a hard time buying into that.

Overall, I did not really enjoy it as much as I thought I would.  Many people in my book club really enjoyed it though, and have gone out to get the next book in this series The Girl Who Played with Fire. I will say that I find it very interesting that the author wrote three and a half books in this series and sadly he passed away before he got to see any of them published.  It is sad really to see that the books are doing so well and he did not get to see it.  So even though this book does not top my favorites list, I know many people who did enjoy it so if mystery is your thing I would at least give it a try.