The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Many years ago, I watched the American film adaptation of this novel (I can't believe 2011 can be described as “many years ago” wtf). Either a blessing or a curse, I have the absolute worst memory when it comes to remembering what happened in films that I've watched. So when I saw this book for sale for $1 at my local library's book stand, I immediately pounced on it and saw an opportunity to dive into this story completely fresh. It was the best $1 I've spent in a really long time.

The book ebbs and flows at the perfect cadence between intense can't-put-this-down suspense and valleys of mundanity, but even the “slow” parts weren't so bad as to be painful to get through. The characters are all unique and have vibrant, interesting personalities and steady story arcs. The story itself is akin to binary stars that orbit a common center of gravity: there are two major plot lines that seem unrelated, and slowly draw each other closer in throughout the book, until they smash together fantastically toward the end.

This was very close to a perfect crime novel, but misses the mark in a few key ways. I'll only discuss one, which frustrated me a lot more than I thought it would: the fact that the two protagonists, Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, had a sexual relationship. If a reader hypothetically dove into this book without knowing anything about the author, then this is the part of the book that they would reach and immediately proclaim, “Ah. So this was written by a man.” The sexual relationship between Blomkvist and Salander is so wildly unrealistic because of how it started and how it persisted (all of which was at the behest of Salander), especially given the massive schism in their backgrounds and personalities. The relationship felt shoehorned into the story, I'm assuming to capture and keep the reader's continued interest, but it was unnecessary, given that the story itself was plenty fascinating. I absolutely hate that there was so much wholesome potential between these two characters and it got completely ruined by the author's overactive imagination. As such, I wanted to dock 1.5 stars off of my rating, but Goodreads doesn't do half-stars, so I'm feeling generous. I give the book 4/5, and it's definitely worth reading. I've already committed to reading the second book in the Millennium series, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and I will decide from there whether or not to continue on.