The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden

December 1, 2013

Jonasson gave us a crusty centenarian in his internationally best-selling debut, The 100-Year-Old-Man Who Climbed Out the Window. Now he gives us Nombeko Mayeki, born desperately poor in Soweto, who works her way up to chief adviser on a hush-hush project. Though South Africa voluntarily dismantled its six nuclear missiles in 1994, Nombeko knows about a seventh missile. Now she's running from South Africa's secret service--and ends up in Sweden. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2014
A funny and completely implausible farce about a woman, a bomb and a man's frustrated ambition to overthrow the king of Sweden.Nombeko Mayeki is a 14-year-old latrine cleaner in apartheid-era Soweto who is exceptionally good at her job. Because of her race, she is incorrectly presumed to be illiterate. She gets another job as the housemaid of the nuclear engineer in charge of South Africa's secret program to build six atomic bombs, and in her spare time, she masters Wu Chinese at the library in Pretoria. The engineer is an incompetent fool who accidentally builds a seventh bomb that remains a secret even to his bosses. Soon, Nombeko ships two crates: dried antelope meat to feed herself as she escapes to Sweden and the 1,700-pound atomic bomb the engineer wants sent to the Mossad in Israel. But the packages get switched, and for years Nombeko carts a 3-megaton bomb around Sweden while the Mossad doesn't know what to do with the antelope meat. Meanwhile, Ingmar Qvist's lifelong dream is to abolish the Swedish monarchy. He indoctrinates his identical-twin sons, both named Holger, to carry on after his death. But Holger One is an idiot, and Holger Two, whose birth was not registered and who thus technically doesn't exist, is intelligent. Because Nombeko is an illegal immigrant, she doesn't exist either. And of course the bomb doesn't exist. Can Nombeko and Holger Two prevent the idiot anarchist Holger One and his idiot girlfriend, Celestine, from blowing up the king, themselves and a sizable chunk of Sweden? Author Jonasson is wickedly inventive with a constant flow of absurdities, for which his narrator blames the Almighty: "If God does exist, He must have a good sense of humor." This book follows Jonasson's equally crazy The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (2012).Definitely not a book for sourpusses. The rest of the world will chuckle all the way through it.

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