I hesitatingly watched the movie when it was on Netflix and really enjoyed that as well.
I started another book by the same author the next year (The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden) but just couldn't get into it. It is one of three books I have abandoned in my reading career (accompanied by Catch-22 and Captain Corelli's Mandolin). It just wasn't for me. Last year Rob read and thoroughly enjoyed Jonasson's Hitman Anders and the Meaning of it All but after my experience with The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden I didn't read it myself.
For this reason I found myself a bit torn when I saw this book in Costco this summer. I just wasn't sure what I would think of it. Would it recapture the magic of the first book or would it mirror his later writing that I didn't enjoy? The first book is one of Rob's all-time favourite books so he bought it right away. He has been too busy with work to read so he gave it to me to read first under strict instructions not to reveal anything about the book to him.
Soooo, it's good he's probably not reading this.
It was a huge disappointment. There were a few funny sentences here and there, but overall it just wasn't interesting. It was very political which just isn't my thing. There are no flashbacks to Allan's past in this book (I guess the whole 100 years had been covered in the first book) so it was all set in the current day. Donald Trump, Kim Jong-Un and Angela Merkel are all characters. This is more of an ensemble story so Allan is almost like a supporting character (and kind of an annoying one at that). We all know Donald Trump is unstable and boorish. I hear about it on the news all the time. I read to get away from that sort of thing.
I did read to the end, but it wasn't worth it. If you loved the first one, like I did, then leave it at that. Don't spoil your image of that book by reading this one.
