alittlelifeofmel's Reviews > The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

3 or 3.5. I still am undecided. My heart tells me 3.5 but my mind tells me 3 stars.

So before I start my review I want to say that this trilogy is amazing! It's a 5 star trilogy and well worth reading. My rating for this book and my following review do not in any way denounce this trilogy, I will recommend it until I die and it is definitely a top book of 2016.
My second before I start is that I enjoyed this book. I want to say that before I get into my review because I think my review will be largely negative but I do want to state to start I DID like this book.

So here's the thing with this book, it was BORING. Like okay so it continues exactly to the minute where book 2 cut off and I loved that and I am glad the author decided to focus this book entirely on the topics he did. But there was so much in this I had to slog through. It took me nearly a month to read this because I read other books and had no interest in this at times. I did find this happened in book 2 as well but wow this was rough. The first 400 pages consisted primarily of Swedish government intel and that just was not for me. The last 300 pages the action started and I really got into it and there was a section near the end I just COULDNT stop reading. (view spoiler)[the absolute BEST part of this book was the court scene when Giannini was cross examining Teleborian. The best thing I've read in ages I was literally reading going SLAY GIRL because it was so fantastic. (hide spoiler)]

Now, I was going to give this 4 stars. I liked the conclusion of the story and while it was boring it was still good. But I gave it 3/3.5 stars because of the characters. The characters were just as amazing as they were in the first 2 books but I feel like Larsson sacrificed them for plot. Now, granted, he had I think 6 books planned but sadly passed away after the third so MAYBE he was going to fix this, but I was extremely disappointed with what I had left of the characters at the end of the story.
---A couple spoilers incoming now---
We had 0 conclusions to any of the character's stories. Salander and Mikael were my two FAVOURITE characters of life and I secretly wished for them to have a happily ever after. Together. But instead I got a barely existing friendship. After the events of the last two books where they didn't see each other a SINGLE time (except like 2 minor interactions in the last 50 pages) I was so let down. I just don't see why Larsson sacrificed what they had like that and threw it away. Blomkvist had chemistry with TWO characters in this series, Berger and Salander. I do not like that he ended up with Figeurola and honestly that's pretty much the entire reason that I gave this 3 stars. I dislike the crappy way the characters story ARCs were done and Blomkvist ended up falling in INSTALOVE with some random character introduced to us on page 500/746. So I just didn't appreciate that. Honestly, I had no plans to read book 4, but I honestly hope this random author ends up salvaging some of the respect I had for Blomkvist and repairing the relationship between the two leads.
Also not to mention that none of the characters got any sort of closure, but I will assume this has to do with the passing of the author before the series was complete.

So I mean overall I DID enjoy this book but I had some very prominent problems. I am going to stand by my decision to call this a trilogy until I read book 4 and see how it fits into the series.