Review: The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden by Jonas Jonasson

I read this based on a recommendation from a friend of mine who had read it and loved it. Jonas Jonasson also wrote the very popular “The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared”, and I had been thinking about picking that one up anyway. So I figured it didn’t matter which of his books I read first and picked up this one.

Boy, was I disappointed! The story was quite slow to pick up and I hated the writing style. It is told in almost a fairytale-like language without too many descriptions of scenery or character and this makes it hard to connect to anything. You are just skidding along on the surface of the story. 

The plot also had its problems for me. Most of the time it was very slow-going and then sometimes it would be quite action-packed for a few pages, but even the action would just get glossed over in the same disinterested language as the rest of the story. 

I get that the style and the unlikely events taking place in this story are meant to be humorous, but I just found it tedious and my credibility had to stretch very thin to accept the events of the story. I really don’t like when books set in a realistic world rely on unrealistic plot points to carry the story along. And there were a lot of unrealistic plot points in this one!


I gave this book 2 stars out of 5 on Goodreads. 

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