The Girl Who Played With Fire (Millennium #2)The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

ugh. Really? Really world? This is the kind of thing you buy by the dozen? (or so it seems)

Okay…let’s go with the positives. This was better than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The way that Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol was better than Police Academy: Mission to Moscow.

I like Lisabeth Salander — yeah, in many ways she’s cliched…but in enough ways she isn’t. The parts of the book that focused on her — not the investigation into her, but her, are far and away the best parts of the novel. Actually, if you cut away the rest of it — which is almost wholly dead weight, it’d be readable.

Now, the problems…well, some of them.

There are just too many characters. Well, there are too many names tied a quick description and some sort of quirk which supposed to equal characters. You could eliminate 30-50% of them and not do a darn thing to the plot.

There are plot lines that do nothing other than chew up space. The whole new job for Berger thing, for instance. Sure, this might come back to mean something in book 3, but I can’t see how.

There’s just too much wasted ink. We don’t need three paragraphs describing someone leaving the house to go get a hamburger and that’s it. Doesn’t advance the plot, doesn’t reveal anything about a character (other than to buttress the theory, based solely on this work, that all Swedes eat McDonald’s obsessively).

I had a laundry list of things to whine about–but who wants to read that (much less write it)? Let’s just leave it as, an over-written, over-long, dull book with one heckuva good, mostly wasted, character.