The Girl Who Played with Fire

Lisbeth Salander is the focus of Stieg Larsson's second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire. For two years, Salander has travelled the world on Weinerstrom's billions, and Mikael Blomkvist has wondered why she cut him off cold. Blomkvist and his partners in Millenium have taken on a freelance journalist who is investigating the sex trafficking that is largely ignored in Sweden. Just before the expose is to be published, the freelance journalist and his girlfriend are found murder and the prints on the murder weapon belong to Salander, who has gone underground leaving hints for Blomkvist as he struggles to prove her innocent.
With three busy children and a job that starts at 7:00 a.m., I rarely read until 2:00 a.m anymore, but Larsson caught me. I couldn't put this novel down. Salander is so supremely clever with her own innate sense of morality and justice that she has become for me the ultimate outsider hero. Her sense of alienation in a bureaucratic world full of injustice, but more importantly pain and suffering of the innocent at the hands of the powerful, the cruel and the perverted, oddly enough, makes her an empathetic character. She would hate that. Blomkvist, on the other hand, is all that we imagine ourselves to be, the crusader against injustice, the journalist with integrity and morality fighting the bad guys. The characters are fascinating and the plot suspenseful, and I didn't figure it all out until the last minute. Unfortunately, I'm now waiting to see what happens to Lisbeth in the third installment. Tomorrow can't come soon enough.
A VERY adult book, Played with Fire, is a fascinating crime-social commentary novel that all crime fiction addicts will enjoy.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Mikael Blomkvist, a financial journalist, has hit bottom. Recently sued for libel, he retreats to northern Sweden where he is offered a job researching the Vanger family, most specifically the disappearnce of Harriet Vanger, forty years ago. Lisbeth Salander, a talented, tattoed computer hacker, not only profiles Blomkvist for Harriet Vanger's very old uncle, she also ends up making a connection with him, and soon the odd team discovers a truth so ugly, so heinous that Blomkvist questions its publication and then his own journalistic integrity.
Very cool book. Stieg Larsson created a fast, intriguing novel with dramatic but real characters and a stunning look at society with the first of his trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Even though Larsson's characters are so vastly different from myself, I liked knowing their thoughts, discovering their moral compasses, so vastly different from each other, and I admired their strengths even as their flaws revealed themselves to each other and to me.
Definately an adult mystery, crime, saga novel, this novel is not for anyone seriously bothered by sexual references and abuse which, sadly, is becoming all too common.

I've been the librarian at CHS for ten years now, and that seems impossible. Of course, I love reading, but that has been seriously inhibited since we added to little girls to our family. A three-year-old and a one-year old don't let mommy read much. Still, I am currently reading Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played with Fire, Dr. Laura Schlessinger's Stop Whining, Start Living, and Malinda Lo's Ash.
I stopped reading Ash on Part II, mostly because it drags, tons of setting description. I like the main character, Ash, and I love the concept of basing it on, YES, my favorite story tale, Cinderella; I even like the "modern" identity-romantic struggle that Ash encounters in the book, but I find it slow. Maybe I'll finish it when school lets out, but probably not, too many other books to try. I think this is a great story, especially for those who like fantasy, and I will recommend it to other readers. I just got a bit bogged down.