Greta Thunberg by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara, Anke Weckmann

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I've adored Greta Thunberg (the 'h' is silent) ever since I first heard about her, and this book tells a fine and inspiring story of the difference a lone young girl can make if she has a cause and some determination.

At the age of fifteen - just two short years ago - and after learning about the sad state of the environment, Greta began a lone vigil outside the Swedish parliament with a sign, 'Skolstrejk för klimatet' (School strike for climate), and her vigil caught on, becoming a major movement.

She reached a point of notoriety where she was able to cross the Atlantic on wind and solar-powered boats (she refuses to fly because of climate impact) and speak to world leaders about how climate change was going to impact hers and future generations.

This book is a great introduction to what one person can do and to what might happen if we all don't do something. I commend it as a worthy read.

The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz

Rating: WARTY!

This is purportedly a continuation of the Millennium trilogy written by Stieg Larsson, but it contains none of Larsson's material which is being held in contention between Larsson's surviving girlfriend of longstanding and his family. This "authorized" version (that is authorized by everyone but Larsson who is dead, and his girlfriend who has possession of his material) was written independently by David Lagercrantz. Once again the title has been changed from the Swedish original, which was Det som inte dödar oss or, That which does not kill us.

The volume runs to some 400 pages, but is so full of fluff and padding that, had the extraneous detail been removed, I would have read the whole thing. As it was, I read only half of it before I gave up out of boredom and disgust. If I had to read the word 'gatan' one more time in any form, I would have honestly puked. I seriously do not need to know every detail of a city in which the characters live and move, and have their being. Indeed, I don't need to know any details of it unless the details are somehow important to the story. A bit of filler I don't mind, but what amounts to paragraphs of it stuffed between the actual interesting bits is just annoying and pretentious. And there really were not any interesting bits here.

The front cover tells us this is "A Lisbeth Salander Novel" but in those two hundred pages I read - the entire first half of the novel - she barely put in an appearance, was absent for most of the early chapters, and hardly even garnered a mention for that matter, let alone actually showed up. How a novel can be deemed to be about a specific character when she not only fails to appear for more than fifty percent of it, but isn't even a topic worth bringing up, is a bigger and more intriguing mystery than the one the novel itself is supposed to relate.

The first nine chapters don't even get us beyond the first day. I know this because the author tediously labeled every chapter November 20th. I care. Any author worth their salt would have made this clear from the writing instead of having to use it as a chapter heading. Hell, put it in 'Part 1' (or part 'November 20') if you have to be that pedantic. Quit hitting me over the head with it every few pages. If I wanted to get 'being hit over the head lessons', I'd contact Terry Jones....

In short, I can't recommend this at all. If you insist on reading it for yourself, I'd suggest you skip the first 120 pages, because literally nothing worth reading about happens before then. Not much happens afterwards, but at least something distantly resembling a thriller begins around there. Unfortunately by that time, I'd lost all interest in pursuing this. I simply didn't care and had no faith whatsoever that this author could replicate what Larsson did without actually cloning what Larsson did. This novel seemed to be every bit as much of a brand new episode in the Millennium universe as the execrable The Force Awakens was a "new" episode in the Star Wars universe.

I saw the movie based on this novel - based on, but barely resembling it. If I had thought it followed the novel I would never have gone to see it, but from preview, it looked like it might be worth watching and I was curious to see how Claire Foy did. She did the best she could with the lousy material, I guess, but the movie castrated Salander and rendered her, as one reviewer put it, into a Goth James Bond. I wouldn't have been that kind. It wasn't a Lisbeth Salander movie in any meaningful sense.

I have to admit I lost some respect for Foy in that she actually chose to do this movie. It was far too Hollywood-ized and neither she nor the writers understand Salander at all. Consequently, it had none of her soul and was essentially nothing more than an attempt at a purse snatch (your purse) by the surviving family of Stieg Larsson in my opinion. In truth it's an insult to Larsson and to his memory as was the novel. I actively dis-recommend both.

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest by Stieg Larsson

Title: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
Author: Stieg Larsson
Publisher: Books On Tape
Rating: worthy

For a review of the Swedish movie based on this novel, Luftslottet som sprängdes, see here

Review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Review of The Girl Who Played With Fire.

This entire trilogy should have been called simply, "The Girl Who Kicks Ass", period! Although there is none of that in this volume. This one starts off exactly where the middle book of this trilogy ended: with Lisbeth Salander being whisked off to hospital with three bullets in her, still covered in the dirt from the grave where she had been buried, and Mikael Blomkvist being arrested by the most incompetent police officer since inspector Clouseau, and that's just the first chapter....

The police finally wise-up to the possibility that maybe Lisbeth isn't the lesbian satanist serial killer she's been portrayed as in the media, and Blomkvist wants to right wrongs whilst avoiding writing wrongs. He starts work on an article to be published in the next edition of Millennium magazine, the very mag which his partner, Erica, is leaving to take up a new high-powered position at a newspaper syndicate. Meanwhile the real villain, whom Blomkvist had trussed up like a turkey for the police, has escaped and both he and Zalachenko are gunning for Salander.

Which is a tragedy since Zalachenko is a patient in the same hospital as the debilitated Salander, and he's parked only three doors away from her! The police are so profoundly stupid that not a single one of them thinks of putting a guard on the doors of either of them, nor does Blomkvist think of suggesting it despite the fact that he's supposed to care deeply for Salander.

Meanwhile, the a segment of the Swedish security police (what there is of it) aka Säpo, is plotting to cover up this mess which has been humongous newspaper-grabbing headline material for months. Good luck with that! Säpo's plan involves a 78-year-old retired agent shooting Zalachenko in the hospital, and then committing suicide. It also involves breaking into Blomkvist's apartment to steal the extant copies of the document which could incriminate Säpo. Zalachenko finally gets nailed, and Blomkvist's sister is mugged. The Man From Säpo visits the senior prosecutor in charge of the case and fills his head with a bunch of crapola about Salander and Blomkvist.

I have to confess that there is a significant amount of pointless prose in this novel just as there was in the previous volume. It's hard to imagine how Larsson even considered putting some of this stuff in there. More to the point, Salander is seriously out of the action in this one, so there is no relief offered by her activities; instead, Larsson has drafted in some utterly tedious nonsense. There's a long discussion on the price of toilets, for example (I am not kidding). Larsson seems obsessed with describing every street in Stockholm in minute detail in terms of how to get from one to the other. He also describes meals in appetite-suppressing detail, and rambles endlessly in rabid pursuit of totally irrelevant digressions.

For example, there's an entire sub-plot about one of the most idiotic women in literature: Blomkvist's married girlfriend, Erica. There's an inane tryst between Blomkvist and a security police officer (who happens to be a rather amazonian female). Blomkvist's indulgence of himself (in all three novels) in irresponsible, "care-free" sex is just downright stupid, and in no case does it contribute anything to the plot. But not one character ever raises the issue of venereal diseases or of the wisdom of jumping into bed with a slut like Blomkvist in this day and age. I really started disliking Blomkvist at the end of volume one, where he callously tears up Salander's heart with his profligate bullshit fling with Berger (I actually strongly dislike the pair of them) was what really turned me off Blomkvist, and he never did climb back into my good graces.

Any new writer who wrote like Larsson did would be (and in this case rightfully) ripped a new one by their editor (if the editor was worth anything), but as we have seen, good editors are few and far between, and evidently Larsson turned in the manuscripts for all three novels right before he died; it was almost like his heart was waiting until he had finished before it decided to stop beating, so no doubt he was given a bye for this trilogy. How wonderful would it be if all of us were given the same free pass? Well, maybe not, judged by some of the crap that's out there! It really goes to show what outrages you can get away with once you have your foot inside someone's publishing door, doesn't it though?

I should also say a word about the bizarre arrangement of the "chapters" or tracks on the audiobook disks, of which there are sixteen. The division into these chapters is completely random, with the breaks coming sometimes in the middle of a sentence! The "chapters are also very long (seven to nine minutes) when compared with those in Kushiel's Dart, which had many more disks, but had "chapter" times at about three minutes each. Just an observation.

So why am I going to rate this novel as worthy? Well, the other two were entertaining, and although this one was really annoying at times, it wraps them up perfectly well. The courtroom scene towards the end, where Blomkvist's sister represents Salander and does it masterfully, makes the rest of it worthwhile. There's a really dragged-out ending which should have been excluded or at least trimmed but that's okay. This whole trilogy is worth a read and Lisbeth Salander is one of the best characters ever to appear in any novel I've ever read.