The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden, by Jonas Jonasson - book review

I read Jonasson's The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared and loved it (review here), so choosing another one of his books was an obvious choice.

The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden is about Nombeko Mayeki, who was born into a life of poverty and managing latrine emptiers in Soweto. However, Nombeko has a talent with numbers and a drive to learn more, which makes her different from others in her hometown of Soweto. After unfortunate circumstances force her to leave the city with a jacket laden with diamonds, Nombeko's simple desire is to travel to the National Library of Pretoria, but the plan doesn't quite work out as intended when she is run over by a drunken engineer shortly after her escape. The novel also includes the story of Ingmar and his obsession, and later hatred, towards the King of Sweden.

As in The 100-Year-Old Man, a series of incredibly unfortunate events occur throughout the story which culminate in the main character having the most bizarre life history that I could imagine. Coincidence and happenstance are once again the foundations of the story, to an arguably even more absurd degree. This was one of the aspects of The 100-Year-Old Man that I really enjoyed, as I hadn't previously read anything in a similar writing style and I found it to be charming and amusing; however, in this book, I sometimes found it a bit much. Towards the end I was getting fed up of the constant misfortune and just wanted things to be resolved, although that could also be due to the length of the book. I felt that there wasn't enough in the middle to keep me interested, and even the humorous subplot with Ingmar and his family wasn't quite enough to pull the middle sections through.

On the other hand, I found Nombeko to be an interesting, witty, and strong main character. One of Jonasson's key strengths are his characters, who are always well written and unique. I particularly enjoyed a moment towards the end of the book involving the main characters and a couple of rather influential figures in Sweden regarding a certain national safety issue, and the last few chapters helped to bump my rating up to 3 from a potential 2!

Rating: 3/5