The girl who played with fire by Stieg Larsson

I had waited this book for so long and I couldn’t wait any more. So I read it in a few evenings, although the book is as thick as a brick, almost 600 pages.

The book is a sequel to ‘The girl with the dragon tattoo’, which I equally enjoyed before. The book is written by a Swedish author Stieg Larsson.

Stieg Larsson was a journalist before becoming a novelist. Therefore his style of writing combines parallel lines of plots and a lot details, with some very fascinating characters.

A young and tiny girl, Salander, no taller than one meter and fifty centimetres, and weigh less than forty KG, was forced to be a heroine. The book exposes a society that systematically fails to protect those who are the most vulnerable, such as women and children. A society as such, is to leave people like Salander to suffer from both physical, and mental abuse by the power of authorities, first from the educational system, then the health system, followed by the social welfare system and the political system, was quite unacceptable and unbearable. Worse still are the acts of authorities who use their power to cover all those violence and brutality. Under this reality, the investigation of series murders wrongly turns its direction to Salander which complicates the plots. It seems the author forces himself to a dead corner very often. However he always manages to turn the things around in triumph. That’s the beauty of the book.

Salander fights back, with her extreme computer and research skills, also with her very few true friends stand by. That is a mostly exciting part of the book that makes me feel good about humanity.

It is a thriller/crime fiction. It is so much in tense and I couldn’t put it down mostly. But sometimes I felt I couldn’t read further either, because my heart was aching for the girl.