Author: Jonas Jonasson
First Published: September 2013
In English: April 2014
Publisher: Harper Collins
384 pages (paperback)
I’ve been seeing this book in a lot of shops lately and decided to pick it up as it piqued my interest (what with my never ending fascination with royalty and all — and look, the word king is right in the title!). I didn’t know much when I dove in. What I did know about this book: I knew the author also wrote The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared, though I have not read that book yet; I knew the book was originally published in Swedish; and I knew the book had a South African girl as the main character. Oh, and based on the title, that said girl was probably going to somehow save the King of Sweden.
This book is a comedy that is mainly about the life of one young girl named Nombeko and how she becomes mixed up with international politics despite being of very low birth. She starts off with not much in the beginning of her life, having been born to a poor family in a shack in South Africa, during the apartheid time period. Nombeko works at the sanitization department for the City of Johannesburg, basically dealing with people’s shit, literally. Cleverly, Nombeko manages to become the boss of said department at the mere age of 14, as well as secretly obtain a fortune in diamonds. Unfortunately, she gets hit by a car, gets sued and winds up working as a cleaning lady for an incredibly lazy and stupid engineer.
From there, Nombeko’s life takes all sorts of twists and turns that I won’t delve too much into because that will just spoil the fun of the story, and she eventually winds up stuck with an atomic bomb in Sweden. Now she, and her new friends (though ‘friends’ is a term being used loosely here, haha) are desperately trying to contact either the Prime Minister of Sweden or the King of Sweden to let them know that, uh, hey, your nuclear-weapon-free country isn’t so nuclear-weapon-free, actually.
When I started this book, I really loved it. I didn’t know it was a humorous book, and it was actually a pleasant surprise after reading so many serious stories. The entire story is kind of like watching an old school cartoon show on television. A lot of improbable events and situations happen, some are downright silly, and the characters are one dimensional as well — which I think is absolutely fine in a comical story such as this. They were memorable and hilarious characters.
I went along for a fast paced and ridiculously fun ride, and before I was even at the halfway point of the book, I was already recommending this novel to my sisters to read. Sadly, around the halfway point was where my feelings towards the book started to change a little bit.
The fast paced plot slowed down — a lot. There were several years in the story’s timeline where Nombeko basically did nothing. She settled down for a while, so to speak, and the story really felt like it was paused or put on hold. As I kept reading, the plot just seemed to drag on and on. I found myself wondering when Nombeko is actually going to do something about that damn atomic bomb to move the story forward.
And you know the whole thing about the girl saving the king of Sweden? That was such a small, tiny part of the story. And I feel as if the title should have been The Girl Who Saved The King and Prime Minister of Sweden, really. Actually, the original Swedish title makes more sense to me — The Illiterate Who Could Count (or translated to something along those lines). Because this book is really about Nombeko’s life, and less so about that small part where she meets the Swedish king.
I still think this book is hilarious till the end, even though the plot kind of got lost or something after a while. Overall, I had a good time reading it and it’s a memorable, farfetched, silly, fun story. I would still recommend it, despite my lack of enthusiasm for the pacing of the latter half of the novel, and I think I have become very interested in this author’s works.
My Rating: 3.5/5
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