Disclaimer: ARC via Netgalley

                In terms of history, this is spot on.  It would help if you are familiar with the general events surrounding the 1066 invasion as well as the politics leading up to it. 

                I mean, Weber remembers the women.  So, you have Harold, Edward, and William.  But you have Edith and Mathilda among others. 

                The one problem is that too many of the men are drawn too much alike, so I had to flip back and forth a couple times.  Still, this is a good, solid comic history of the events.  In particular, while it does have nudity and blood (quite a bit of blood), it would be a fitting read for a younger student of history. 

I was not impressed with the protagonist at first. Actually, I didn't like him at all throughout the story. I am biased against first person POV to begin with and it doesn't help that the protagonist is even called out by secondary characters for being a bit of a jerk, yet this adds to his charm overall, just like oh yeah, I speak a foreign a language and I grew up BFFs with politically strategic figures in this suddenly plot relevant country but, uh, I didn't think that was important enough to mention conversations happen at just the right moment.

Sometimes I read a book and know that it would make a great summer movie starring a famous white actor. And I would totally go see it because it would be thrilling and action-packed.

But in written form - it hurt to read sometimes. Not that the science bits weren't interesting, and I did appreciate that the author remembered his characters have to eat at some point to stay alive, but it still felt like a cliche fest. A well-written cliche fest, to be fair.

YMMV.

The concept is kind of interesting. 

Rant has more friends after death than he ever had when he was alive. 

That's so true. People pretend to know persons after they died. Yet they never even remember to call or make any kind of contact with such persons when they were alive.

The rant is a bit of strange and gross at time. Just starting the book and I want to know what's the point of knowing this person through the eyes of others.

And maybe that's the point. 

The story take a sharp turn to the weird and go straight to bizarre. 

Reading this one is like walking through a halloween house of terror and the designer of this place is try to shock you with strange things, not all together unpleasant, but it is not pleasant either.

If you don't like this kind of leading you down the dark allay kind of story and expect a smooth unfolding of the story would have asked "what's the point" by now.

Don't know. Don't care. I'm in for the ride. 

And this book is kind of a ride. 

The ride got stranger when Rant left his parents house.

Party crashing is a thing in the book.

The later part of the book get a Wayward Pines turn. 

Weird. If you like it, it is a four stars. If you don't like strange story, you shouldn't have picked this up in the first place.

It is that kind of of a book. 

It took me forever and a half to trudge through listening to this book. The narrator remains the same as the previous three of the original series in audiobook format, however, the quality of writing does not. One can attribute that to the fact that no two authors have the same style, no matter how much the second may try to imitate the first. Actually, maybe the problem was that Lagercrantz tried too hard to emulate Larsson's style and the result was a seemingly amateur attempt at trying to cram in the entire cast of (surviving) characters from the series into one vaguely comprehensible storyline.

A lot of plotlines seem to be recycled: Millennium magazine is endangered (again); Blomkvist is disillusioned with journalism (again); Lisbeth's family is evil - well, her only known and surviving family member anyway - and out to get her (again); and so on.

One of the most irksome bits was a tiny detail, which was the same investigation squad getting lumped back together to investigate the situation that arises in this book, and it includes the heavily prejudiced cop who apparently suffered no consequences after the previous story. In fact, seems like no one learned anything after the last book.

A lot of tiny threads forcefully woven back in together to make a lumpy quilt of a story. And, perhaps this only happened towards the end of the book or I just only noticed it by that point, a lot of the action is told in flashback form, with a third party telling the story or the action being retold with added insight, minus the actual insight. Nothing seems to happen in the moment, there is no... excitement. A lot telling, no showing.

Meh. I can't even write out proper thoughts about this story, it is just so mish-mash blah.

So I didn't bother to look up any background on this because by the time I finished the book (forced myself to blitz through the last 40% tonight in one shot to get off my Currently Reading list) but I gather from context that the author, Linda Grant, started a fashion style blog some years ago and this book was later spawned. It seems like she just expanded on some blog posts; sometimes she directly cites posts and comments from her blog.

I was initially intrigued by such writing as this paragraph from the section I was able to preview on Scribd:

-- "The purpose of this book is to advance no theses, to break no ground in the history or theory of fashion, but rather to explore what is already known but rarely thought about by the ordinary mass of humanity who is interested in fashion and might, quite wrongly, feel a little ashamed of this passion. Might fear that they are not going to be taken seriously. That in announcing this preoccupation they will have confessed that women are not really fully grown up; unlike our male counterparts, who have mature and adult preoccupations without which the human race could not survive, such as moving balls from one end of a grassy field to the other with the aid of the human foot."

Splendid, I thought. Sarcastic, too, even better!

I regret the credit I wasted on Scribd for this book now. I accept that the author claimed there was no defining stance on the topic, and given that the topic is fashion, can there really be any firm ground to stand on at all? Yet that is exactly what she tries to do! Ping ponging from how clothing and adornment was a vital part of reestablishing self-identity to Holocaust survivors (agreed) to slamming women who dress unsuitably based on how the people around them (read: the author) react to promoting feminism in the form of being able to wear whatever a woman feels empowered wearing back to deifying the mythical standard of Old Hollywood Glamour which no one is able to achieve in the modern day because the author hasn't been able to, end discussion. The part that irritates me about this flip flopping, which okay, perfectly reasonable to spend 250+ pages rambling about to a paying public if we're sucker enough to buy it, is that her writing voice comes across as so darn condescending and prejudiced.

If I could throw this book across the room, I would. Alas, e-books and the fragility of my electronic devices.

Not to say I didn't find the book entirely devoid of enjoyment. If you can speed read through it, then the sharply written bits are quite funny and you can brush off the rest. The hard part was forcing myself to keep coming back to it to read more after being interrupted.