Review: The Girl in the Spider's Web (D. Lagercrantz)
I was more that just a tad nervous to read this book because I adored the original trilogy, and didn't want it to be ruined by the two follow-ups that were written by Lagercrantz. And as I've told a lot of people when talking about this book, it wasn't bad. In fact, if I had never read the original trilogy I probably would have rated it 5 stars and considered it a favorite. But I think trying to follow in the original trilogy's footsteps really did this book a disservice, because it is by no means a bad book. It just isn't as good as the first three, and I think that's mostly because Larsson had this intricate plot and all the characters in his head, and Lagercrantz had to try and recreate that. Sometimes he succeeded, but sometimes the writing just seemed off--again, I don't think this is something I would have noticed had it not followed the first three.
I'm going to skip the plot summary that I normally insert here because I made the mistake of reading The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye directly after this one and I don't want to spoil the second one accidentally. I hate it when other people do it to me, so I don't want to do it to other people. Sorry :(
I did like how this book still had somewhat of the original Millennium feel. There was action, corruption, gunfire, all of the fun things that were included in the first three books. We got to see a little more of Blomkvist and a little less of Lisbeth, which wasn't my most favorite thing in the whole world, but it was kind of nice to get to know him better. We also are introduced to a whole new slew of characters which is great because Lagercrantz does a good job of creating interesting, complex secondary characters, but bad because... names. Not good with names. At all. I also did enjoy the plot, the action, and stuff like that. Again, it was just hard to get overjoyed about it after reading the original 3.
My largest complaint besides the fact that this book wasn't the same as the first three was that Lisbeth seemed like a completely different person. She was tamer, did less of her usual stunts, and spent a ton of time babysitting. I enjoyed seeing her interact with August, but I felt like I was looking at someone who happened to be named Lisbeth but totally wasn't the Lisbeth I was looking for. I loved the original Lisbeth!
I feel like this book would have been so much better had it not followed Larsson's amazing first three, because while it is a great book and would be amazing on its own, when stacked up next to Larsson's it falls a bit short.
4/5 Stars