By JULIET PEREZ
Staff Writer
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo written by Stieg Larsson is a novel that touches so many important subjects in society and does it perfectly. The book empowers women while also acknowledging the abuse women endure in everyday life in different places. I believe the book is incredibly written because it doesn’t make women look weak or powerless when put in situations that are harmful towards them but instead shows how they overcome and push their strength through difficult things. Some subjects that the book covers are abuse in the foster system, sexual abuse (in families and the workplace), murder, violence against women, parental abuse, and gender stereotypes.
The book is about a Swedish journalist named Mikael Blomkvist who is faced with a new adventure, to solve a mystery. Henrik Vanger, the former CEO of the Vanger Corporation, invites Mikael to live on the island of Hedeby for a year in order to solve a lifelong mystery of what happened to his niece, Harriet Vanger. Harriet “died” 36 years before Mikeal’s hiring, and Henrik has no idea who killed her. He believes it was someone in the family but could not solve the incident since it happened. He leaves it up to Mikeal to solve it by giving him an insane amount of family journals, pictures, and Harriet’s own personal belongings in order to find any sort of hint as to who it could be.
Lisbeth Salander works at Milton Security, where she performs freelance surveillance. She is seen by other people as this incredibly intelligent, strange, strong, secretive woman, but the reader can see how troubled she really is. She goes through so much throughout the book and it is evident that her past was also extremely traumatizing. Lisbeth needs a guardian because she is a ward of the state. A ward of the state are people who need guardians because they have been or are incarcerated, in Lisbeth’s case she was incarcerated and seen as “mentally incompetent” and dangerous. The book doesn’t go too much into her past although we do know that her first guardian, Holger Palmgren, had a stroke and could not carry on with his duties. Holger and Lisbeth had a close relationship and he was fighting for her to get her deinstitutionalized, and so his stroke obviously affected her emotionally. Her new guardian, Nils Bjurman, is sexually abusive and makes Lisbeth feel that if she doesn’t comply with his needs, he will not do his duties or help her like he should. That is until she stands up for herself and shuts him down by physically hurting him and threatening to harm his reputation with a video she took of him.
Lisbeth is then hired by Dragan Armansky, who works for Henrik Vanger. She is hired to find as much information she can on Mikael but she does so by hacking his computer. When Mikeal finds this out he goes to Lisbeth and tells her that he wants her to work with him to investigate what happened to Harriet with him. They live together for a year while they solve the mystery.
The book is so good and speaks about important issues so well. The book is written not only by Stieg Larsson but with a lot of help from his fiancé Eva Gabrielsson. They worked together with women who had been abused in order to write the book as precisely and as accurately as they could, without making women look weak. The book is a great step in feminism and just a good storyline in general, it keeps the reader on their toes and intrigued, as it is a mystery book after all.