The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest follows on from book two in the Millennium series, The Girl Who Played With Fire. It picks up right where the second book left of and has a similar pace.
By similar pace, I mean that the first third of this book is a slow build. There are parts that may lose readers as the book recaps details from the previous book. If you’re reading The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest soon after finishing The Girl Who Played With Fire then you may find yourself slightly bored from the rehashing of information.
However, if it has been a while since you read the second book then you may appreciate it. Especially when this series is notorious for having many characters with hard to remember names.
With that being said, the slow build is worth it. Once the book hit the midway mark I was so invested that I couldn’t put it down for too long.
When compared to book two, I find that The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest has less high intense action sequences than The Girl Who Played With Fire did. Much of the action comes towards the end of the book and instead of delivering on repeated thrills, this book has a much slower pace that focuses heavily on government conspiracy, privacy and espionage.
Heroine, Lisbeth Salander, spends much of the book in recovery after the events of the second book, but never does it feel like he significance to the story is waning. Mikael Blomkvist has a more active role in the story than he did in the previous book. And he’s heavily in the mix of all the major plot points.
One thing that puts many people off about this book is a sub-plot that in the end, has no significance to the final outcome. This sub-plot concerns former Millennium editor-in-chief Erika Berger, as she’s confronted with an issue of privacy at her new office.
What disappoints the most about this sub-plot is that the build up is so strong, and it could have led to an extremely satisfying outcome. But instead the sub-plot is wrapped up in about 100 pages and the outcome is so lackluster that it makes you question why it was even needed. In a book that’s already so large, some readers don’t want a moment to be wasted on something that feels unnecessary.
Still, the sub-plot did one thing, and that’s continue to flesh out Berger’s character in a way that gives her some relevance by the end of the book.
The Girl Who Played With Fire introduced a slew of new supporting characters that became relevant to the conflicts surrounding Lisbeth Salander. In specific I’m talking about characters like Sonja Modig, Jan Bublanski, Richard Ekström, Miriam Wu and Ronald Niedermann. Sadly, in The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest, the characters take much more of a background role and pretty much just become plot devices. Miriam Wu and Ronald Niedermann barely even make an appearance, despite their significance in the second book.
But even when taking into account the nitpicks of this book, I very much enjoyed it and I gave it a five-star rating on GoodReads. I was left with a feeling of emptiness when it was over, and much of this comes from the fact that I know author Stieg Larsson had more stories planned for these characters before his passing.
There currently exists a fourth and fifth book in the Millennium series. But these books are written by another author. For legal reasons, the author wasn’t able to use the materials that Stieg had produced for the his next intended books in the series. Which means that we’ll never get to fully realise these characters journey after book three the way that their original creator had intended.
Maybe after some years I will be open to giving The Girl in the Spider’s Web a chance. But right now I can’t bring myself to revisit these characters from a fresh person’s perspective.
My Final Take on The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest…
If I summarise Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, I’d say these three books are well worth a read. But The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is so different in tone from it’s sequels that many readers will either love the last two books or only love the first one. People say that they enjoyed the thriller and mystery aspect of the first book, but didn’t enjoy the over-exaggerated tone of books two and three. I understand these comments and I acknowledge the differences in tone. However, I personally enjoyed each unique tone in these books for what they did well.
When it comes down to it, these three books hold a huge significance in literature to me. I will always remember them as some of my favourite books.
