The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
Ratings603
Average rating4.1
Eh. A grudging 3. I was irritated or bored through much of it, and if I'm editing sentences as I read they are really bad. And even though I was less bored during the Erica segments, why the hell were they in the book? Anyways, I'm giving it 3 because it was satisfying to have the series wrapped up.
Stieg Larsson is an amazing juggler, so many characters and sub-plots, and yet he keeps them all in the air and the reader enthralled. Great read!
Seems like a whole lot of work to get to the 100 page finale of wonderful courtroom drama writing. And the ending doesn't feel appropriate to the trilogy. Perhaps Larsson intended to write another Millennium epic (concerning Lisbeth's estranged sister?) but this allusion was redacted once he passed away. The style and content of the final chapter just don't fit with that of the other 1600 or some pages of his work.
I finally sat down and read the last in the Millennium Trilogy. I'd been putting it off for some time now because I just didn't want to be done with it. Knowing that there is really no chance there will ever be another book, at least not one written by Larsson, made me drag my feet.
I suppose it was a satisfying ending to an excellent trilogy. Lisbeth is one of my favorite book characters. She's tough, yet slightly vulnerable. Incredibly smart and despite her better judgment quite moral.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was slow to start for me. The financial process in the beginning of the book was not only over my head, but incredibly boring and I almost put the book down. I had read the book before it became a hit so I hadn't heard anything about it yet, but I powered through it anyway. And I'm glad I did. It was a brilliant book. The characters were rich and full and the story was so mysterious and suspenseful. I loved it.
The Girl Who Played with Fire jumped right into the action, but it kind of felt like it was a filler to get to the last book. The focus on Lisbeth was gripping and frustrating and the fact that readers had to wait until the next book to get resolution was unexpected. Especially since the first book was more like a stand alone type novel.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest took quite some time to get going. Watching the conspiracy unfold was excruciating! I didn't really get into the book until the last third, about the time of the trial. I couldn't wait to see what everyone had up their sleeves.
There were a few things that seemed unnecessary to me. One of them being the off shoot of Berger to SMP. I thought it would somehow tie into the story as a whole, but not so much.
Still, one of the best trilogies I've ever read. It is so sad that Stieg Larsson didn't live to see his books' successes, but what a success it is.
http://knowitnotsomuch.blogspot.com/2011/02/girl-who-captivated-world.html
Blast it all, Larsson made me eat my words – many of them, anyway – about his ability to write a decent thriller with his third Millennium book. If anyone else had written this, I'd probably have given it 2.5-3 stars, but in comparison to his first two books, this one looks sooo much better.
A lot of the weaknesses of the first two books are still present–the persistent eye for irrelevant, and momentum slowing detail; an overabundance of characters; plotlines that do little-to-nothing to serve the main plotlines; stock characters abound; etc., etc.
But we see some real growth in Lisbeth, some potential growth in Blomquist, and a courtroom scene at the end that makes one wonder if there's another female character that's supposed to be the real hero of this set. In my book, that scene covers a multitude of crimes against fiction that Larsson committed.
Am I glad I slogged through the series? Not really. But having made it through the first book, and suffered through the second, I really enjoyed this one.
But man, am I so glad there's not a #4
A wonderful finish to a great trilogy. And, it goes to show you if you've been shit on your entire life by the government, the police, doctors, and everyone around you the best people to have in your arsenal are the head of a private security business, a pigheaded investigative journalist, and a women's rights lawyer who has no idea what she knows she's doing until she does.
The last book of the Millennium trilogy, this one ends the series with both a bang and with a whimper. It's a very slowly paced book (even compared to the first two in the series), and while there is a lot of interesting delving into conspiracy and crime throughout it, a lot of that delving is done through remotely accessing hard drives and setting up private Yahoo groups to share data without being observed, which aren't exactly thrilling ways to advance the plots.
If you enjoyed the first two, you'll definitely want to read this one, but it does have many of the same thematic elements - crusading journalists bringing the truth to light, strong, independent women overcoming the misogyny of those around them, and delving into the dirty secrets that a modern nation can be built upon. Fun reads if you're so inclined (and I am), although each of them could probably stand to be a couple of hundred pages shorter.
An incredible end to the series. Like the rest of the books it has some parts that are pretty graphic but nothing seems thrown in for simply shock value. Everything leads to a story payoff. Overall I think the series started a little slow but got better as it went on and by the third book was extremely engaging from the very beginning.
An easy recommendation for anyone who enjoys suspense and can deal with a few graphic scenes.
At first I felt kind of blah about reading this book—almost 600 pages and what on earth was Larsson's characters going to do? But once I got into it, I really enjoyed it. The layered political scandal and corruption fit with women's rights and the power of women, as Lisbeth and Giannini conveyed. I think it's really interesting as well how certain book titles are translated to other languages the way they are. For example, The [b:Girl with the Dragon Tattoo|2429135|The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium, #1)|Stieg Larsson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1275608878s/2429135.jpg|1708725] was once Men Who Hate Women—a more apt and fitting title for the beginning of this series.
Though Larsson had other books planned in this series, I think that the way this book ended tied the series up well, since the other manuscripts are unfinished. The trial was unbelievable!
Maybe it's the reviews I've read and the Stieg Larsson is an unprofessional writer and his novels are inexplicably popular pulp trash narrative that much of the Internets has seem to have adopted, or maybe it's the fact that I recently read Moby Dick, but I did notice more digressions of a political and historical nature in Hornet's Nest, as compared to the other books in the Millenium trilogy. These digressions do slow things down at times in the first third or so of the book, but the majority of the novel succeeds in making investigative magazine journalism seem like an exciting form of superhero crime-fighting. Much of this is due to the larger cast of characters and increased roles for ancillary characters from the previous novels. Larsson is able to bounce the telling of his story between multiple focal points, making a 600-page novel fly by like a pulp novella. The last quarter of the book, which deals with Salander's court case, is phenomenal. It was impossible to put down, and not just in a cliched book jacket blurb way. I should have been cooking a frozen pizza and fixing my injured pool robot, but I couldn't stop reading. Stieg Larsson might not be able of crafting Nabokovian prose, but he writes a helluva good novel.
Maybe it's the reviews I've read and the Stieg Larsson is an unprofessional writer and his novels are inexplicably popular pulp trash narrative that much of the Internets has seem to have adopted, or maybe it's the fact that I recently read Moby Dick, but I did notice more digressions of a political and historical nature in Hornet's Nest, as compared to the other books in the Millenium trilogy. These digressions do slow things down at times in the first third or so of the book, but the majority of the novel succeeds in making investigative magazine journalism seem like an exciting form of superhero crime-fighting. Much of this is due to the larger cast of characters and increased roles for ancillary characters from the previous novels. Larsson is able to bounce the telling of his story between multiple focal points, making a 600-page novel fly by like a pulp novella. The last quarter of the book, which deals with Salander's court case, is phenomenal. It was impossible to put down, and not just in a cliched book jacket blurb way. I should have been cooking a frozen pizza and fixing my injured pool robot, but I couldn't stop reading. Stieg Larsson might not be able of crafting Nabokovian prose, but he writes a helluva good novel.
I agree with Amanda. Not as good as the first but way better than the second. I enjoyed it completely, regardless. If this series gets remade into some sort of tv or movie in the states I hope they do right by it!
Ranking: book 1, 4 stars, book 2, 5 stars, book 3, 3 stars.
There just wasn't enough Salander in this book. And too many Swedish police officers.
I do love how things turned out with Blomqvist. I would keep reading if Larsson had published more. But this is it, the end. It was good.