Millennium II
As reviewed earlier in the year I loved The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and was very much looking forward to reading the rest of the series.
I don't think that the second Millennium novel The Girl Who Played with Fire is as good as the first. On the positive side it moves at a cracking pace. There's a good storyline, and some of the characters are very well drawn especially the relationship between Lisbeth and Palmgren. Where I think it's slightly lacking is that it's really not a stand-alone novel. It dives straight into the action with most of Lisbeth's character development already being done in the previous novel. This left me feeling slightly ambivalent about it - as a reader who'd read Girl with the dragon tattoo, I enjoyed it, but thinking of it critically, I could see real problems with reading it out of sequence - Lisbeth, for example, comes across as much more sympathetic having read volume I, than if you haven't, and as she's the central character I think that's a bit of a flaw.
There are some great villains, at least one of whom seems to have come straight out of James Bond. It's good fun, and I'll definitely read Millennium III to see how Larsson wraps everything up, but I found it just a little disappointing.
And that's the last of my 3 Scandanavian novels - don't know why but I seem to have had a bit of a Scandanavian Fest recently, now reading something completely different - although there will be some Haakan Nesser in the near future - you have been warned...
I don't think that the second Millennium novel The Girl Who Played with Fire is as good as the first. On the positive side it moves at a cracking pace. There's a good storyline, and some of the characters are very well drawn especially the relationship between Lisbeth and Palmgren. Where I think it's slightly lacking is that it's really not a stand-alone novel. It dives straight into the action with most of Lisbeth's character development already being done in the previous novel. This left me feeling slightly ambivalent about it - as a reader who'd read Girl with the dragon tattoo, I enjoyed it, but thinking of it critically, I could see real problems with reading it out of sequence - Lisbeth, for example, comes across as much more sympathetic having read volume I, than if you haven't, and as she's the central character I think that's a bit of a flaw.
There are some great villains, at least one of whom seems to have come straight out of James Bond. It's good fun, and I'll definitely read Millennium III to see how Larsson wraps everything up, but I found it just a little disappointing.
And that's the last of my 3 Scandanavian novels - don't know why but I seem to have had a bit of a Scandanavian Fest recently, now reading something completely different - although there will be some Haakan Nesser in the near future - you have been warned...
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