The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden follows the odd life of Nombeko, an oddly brilliant South African orphan from Soweto. She starts out as a worker with the sanitation committee, becomes manager at age 14, then one day is hit by a drunk driver and sentenced to be his servant for 7 years to repay the damages to his car. The drunk turns out to be a nuclear engineer working on South Africa's secret nuclear missile program. Nombeko soon becomes more involved in the project than the engineer himself, correcting his numbers and giving him answers to hang ups the team encounters. Nombeko uses her time in servitude to learn Chinese from the other servants in the engineers house and to read all the books she can get her hands on. A day comes when the South African government decides it will look good for them to make a public display of them destroying their 6 nuclear warheads, but the engineer mistakenly had his team create 7 leaving a bomb that he does not want anyone to find out about. The engineer is suddenly killed and Nombeko knows that she will be seen as expendable and receive a similar fate, so she makes an arrangement with the Israeli mossad to trade the extra warhead for her ticket out of South Africa. She goes to Sweden where this biggest and most ridiculous mix up you could imagine keeps her trying to stay under the radar, and fast forwarding years later she does end up saving the King of Sweden.
This story was so ridiculous it actually became painful. I like a bit of craziness as much as the next person, but this book could have ended in so. many. places. Its incredibly stupid and random plot twists became so old that I had to seriously muscle through the second half just to get it done and move on with my life. The plot was so dumb that I honestly question the sanity of the mind that created it. I can only hope I never have to read any of his works again.
I give this book 2 out of 5 stars.
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