Currently Reading: The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden

I’m already 80% through the book and still enjoying it. In fact, it’s now made me chuckle a couple of times.

If you don’t like slightly surreal (slightly) stuff and don’t really enjoy books with a slight fairy tale quality to them (slight, again), then I wouldn’t recommend this book. It is a sweet book, with quite a few implausible events in it, but these are just part of the style, all you need to do is suspend disbelief.

Nombeko is an incredibly bright girl who manages to win the hearts of some decent people and get on the wrong side of some less decent ones. To say that the book narrates her adventures would seem a bit too epic, as the most extraordinary events are told in an almost matter-of-fact way.

“You’re not angry with me because of this thing about the atomic bomb, then?”
“Nah, such things happen.”

As in The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and DisappearedJonas Jonasson weaves in real events from past and contemporary history which, in addition to drawing you closer to the characters also shows the funny and ironic side of some of these events.

The book starts off in South Africa, involves the Mossad and a couple of Swedish brothers. And of course, I’m still waiting to see how Nombeko saves the king.