The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest (Millennium Trilogy, #3)

by Stieg Larsson

[clementine]

There was so much going on here. The scenario set up at the beginning of the book (which continued directly from the second one) seems so far from the final events at the end. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but there's so much going on that it becomes very hard to wrap your head around.

Part of the issue for me is the sheer volume of characters and POVs. I can see that this is tricky, because much of the story would make no sense without the constant shifts in perspective, but all of the characters got a bit tricky to track, and the majority of them came out far from fully realized. Lisbeth is by far the strongest character to me. Mikael and Erika, being the other main protagonists, are also pretty well developed, but almost everyone else just falls flat. I suppose impressive characterization isn't the point of this series, but it took me away from the story a bit. (And, honestly, while I like Erika, I felt like her subplot was generally unnecessary and just added about 474839 pages that I could have done without! Not that it was uninteresting, it was just so unrelated to the rest of the already long and convoluted book.)

Another issue, as usual, is the excessive description and exposition through dialogue. Not gonna lie, I skipped through probably 20 or so pages because it bored me to tears. I wish this had been edited better, because we really don't need to know every tiny thing every minor character does, nor do we need long stretches of dry dialogue in place of showing us something.

I feel like I'm really hitting on the negative points here, but I didn't hate the book. I thought it was a good end to the series (although there's certainly evidence of Larsson's eventual plans to expand it) and to wrap up the numerous loose ends from the second book. It was well-plotted and considering how complex it was not very hard to follow (besides the plethora of characters, of course).

Overall, I really liked The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and feel like it would have worked best as a well-constructed standalone crime novel. It seems to me like Larsson got attached to the characters and kept writing about them, but I don't know if I think that these two books should have been published without extensive revision. I can understand the demand for them, but personally I don't feel that they complement the first very well, and although they were by no means worthless, I could have lived without reading them.