Book Review: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Sarah Schiavoni

By now, most people have seen Girl with the Dragon Tattoo featured on bestseller lists around the world, heard about the movie version (released in 2009), or read it for their book club. My mother heard of the book through the latter of those three but barely got past the first few chapters before losing interest and passing it on to me. The title intrigued me, and the green Chinese water dragon slithering across the cover caught my eye, so I decided to give it a shot. Like my mother, I was unimpressed and slightly confused by the first few chapters, which consisted of a lot of discussion and debate about financial magazine reporting, a journalist facing jail time for false reporting, and a large corporation fighting against possibly true allegations of some sort of financial scandal. As the book is set in Sweden, I couldn’t get my bearings straight and had no concept of what the towns and businesses were like—forget being able to pronounce the characters’ names properly. Despite this not-so-great start, as I read further, the story quickly became clearer and I became more invested in learning about the lives of the characters.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo follows the stories of Mikael Blomvkist, a financial journalist caught in a journalistic scandal, and Lisbeth Salander, a pierced-and-tattooed 20-something with a knack for spying and using advanced technology. Blomvkist, accused in court of libel, is struggling to put his life back together when he is contacted by Dirch Frode, lawyer for the aged but famous businessman Henrik Vanger. Vanger offers Blomvkist a two-part job that is to last a year in Hedeby, the town where the Vanger family lives: he is to write the autobiography of the Vanger family, but his true purpose is to research the disappearance of Harriet, Vanger’s grandniece, and try to find out what happened to her. Salander, a sullen and difficult ward of the state, works for Milton Security, taking on freelance jobs involving extensive background checks on select individuals. She is first connected to Blomvkist when Frode contacts her to look into Blomvkist’s history before bringing him to Hedeby. When her research is complete, she works on other jobs in Stockholm, facing terrible problems due to her status as a ward of the state. The story is peppered with scandal, familial and romantic tensions, murder, sexual violence, and mystery as Blomvkist steadily works toward finding out what happened to Harriet and reconnects with Salander in order to find the truth.

Though the book had a confusing and slow start, it quickly improved and was incredibly hard to put down. I had a thousand guesses about what happened to Harriet, was caught by surprise when murder enters the already convoluted story and creates an even more expansive mystery, and was curious to learn more about Salander and her sad past. The story is detailed, intense, and, at some points, graphically violent, but it is very well told and maintains a high level of suspense even until the end. I’m most definitely considering picking up the second book of this 3-and-¾-book-long series, though I’m curious to see how Larsson’s death before the completion of the series will affect the whole story.