The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg LarrsonEvan’s ESS= 5.4 out of 10
Erin’s ESS= 3 out of 10
Content = R (Violence, Language, Adult Content, Nudity, Illicit Sexual Acts, Mythical Animal Tattoos)
Why: If you couldn’t already tell from our somber facial expressions, we’ve got some major issues to discuss in this post. For the past few months we’ve tried to get swept into the hype associated with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And with all the excitement surrounding the novel, this wasn’t difficult. We were impatiently waiting to watch the Swedish film adaptation and follow the latest casting drama surrounding the American remake. Hopefully by now you can see the HUGE hole in our master plan. We kind of assumed that the novel would deliver on its hype... oops.
We’ll try not to get ourselves all worked up in this review, but at this point, we’re not making any promises. Just so everyone’s clear, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo follows the exploits of a hard hitting journalist recently convicted of libel against a corrupt Gazillionaire industrialist. Discredited and humiliated, Mikael Blomkvist agrees to take on a unique assignment writing a family biography while at the same time investigating a questionable missing persons case from 40 years earlier. It doesn’t take long before Blomkvist solicits the help of an eccentric and hardened female who happens to possess a Dragon Tattoo. Together, the pair expose plenty of skeletons and encounter more than one life threatening exchange.
Okay, onto our thoughts... When reading a novel, there are a few “nice to haves”. Most importantly, we need to actually like the main characters, or at the very least, understand their motivation. For all the back story given to many of the corporations and their CEO’s, couldn’t a little more time have been spent explaining why Blomkvist felt the need to be a self proclaimed horrible father? Also, it would have been nice to know why Lisbeth (the girl with the dragon tattoo) has a gigantic bag of Doritos attached to her shoulder. We’re given some clues, but very little prior to her encounter with that slime ball, Bjurman (maybe more to come in book 2 & 3???). We also want to know why she has zero concern for anyone’s privacy. Both characters felt zero remorse for any of the carnage left in their world-beating wake.
We also have some major issues with the anticlimactic bad guy car chase scene near the end. Really, why all the build up if things are just going to end like that???
Our final issue with the novel was the blasé attitude towards relationships and intimacy. Everyone’s perfectly comfortable sleeping with everyone else. It doesn’t matter if adults in question are married or even if children are involved – everyone and everything is fair game (okay, maybe not everything).
We really need to wrap things, and frankly we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the suspense and intrigue that was also prevalent in the story. On more than one occasion we found ourselves reading well past midnight. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo also deserves credit for taking on the serious and real topic of sexual abuse against women. Honestly, if this novel wasn’t sooooo hyped, we probably would have enjoyed it more. In the end, we were just hoping for more... or a little something different...
