I liked the part with the squirrel.

The plot/story is pretty good. Decent potboiler tension towards the end, but ends when there is still plenty of story left to tell (I don't mean about Oskar and Eli; about everyone else).

The writing is pretty bad. But worst of all, the trauma and horrors are unearned, seem to be played mostly for shock and gross-out value. There's no heart, no feeling, no sympathy, no magic. It's dull, tone-deaf, offensive. Never sad, funny, scary, heartwarming. Maybe it's the fault of the translation, but I kind of doubt it.

I liked the movie (the Swedish one; haven't seen the American one) which takes the plot of the book fairly literally, but tells it so much better.