The Millennium series is over. This is so depressing.The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is the much-anticipated sequel to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire. I have previously raved about TGWPWF, so I think everyone knows how I feel about these books. Stieg Larsson has yet again crafted a beautiful book, and the entire series was tied up very well.
When we last saw the main characters, Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, they were both in pretty bad shape. TGWKTHN picks up immediately at the end of the previous book and jumps right back into the story. I won't go into much detail because I know a few folks who are still reading either this book or the last book.
The first two books were pretty much non-stop action/shocking discoveries/something cool, but this book is admittedly much, much slower. The first couple hundred pages are actually very calm and more of a "catching up" type thing, but the last 1/3 of the book more than makes up for it. It took me a while to get through the first half of the book, but I read the last half in a couple of days. Part of the reason for the slow pace is the fact that there are about 84,095,890,850 characters to either introduce or re-introduce. Investigators, lawyers, journalists, general thugs. There are so. Many. People. I found myself trying to remember where they had been mentioned in the other books, and I searched high and low online for a character list. (Didn't find one. Who wants to make one for me?) What's worse, they're all freaking Swedish. They all sound the same to an uncultured American like myself. Ekstrom, Erikson, Erlander, Bublanski, Blomkvist, Malin, Malm. SERIOUSLY? It was really hard for me to keep straight who was good and who was bad, especially because some characters had 50 pages or so in between mentions. I essentially just gave up trying to remember who was who and tried to figure it out with context clues. That's my one complaint about this book, although I'm not sure how that could've been avoided when you've created such a awesome and intricate world as the one that Larsson has created with this series.
Salander is just as amazing in this book as she is in the other two. I can't say enough about how much I totally love her. She's easily of my favorite characters in any book I've read, ever. This book shows us a lot more about her, but it also introduces another awesome female character who I love -- Annika Gianinni. She was introduced in the earlier books, but only as Mikael's sister. In this book, her skills as a lawyer are used, and she is incredible. Love her to death.I don't think I'm spoiling anything by saying that there is, at one point, a trial, and it was easily my favorite part of the book, mostly thanks to Gianinni. So great.
When it comes down to it, I liked TGWTDT and TGWPWF better than this book, but it's really hard to compare them all to each other. Even though they're all part of the same series, they all have such different hearts. This book ties everything together beautifully, and although it does have some fantastic action sequences, it's not as thrilling as the other two. Still, after you've read the other two, you're so invested in the characters that you don't need the non-stop action to keep your interest. The characters do that themselves.
Read from June 6, 2010 to June 19, 2010
4/5 stars
-- C
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