The Shining Girls

by Lauren Beukes

In Depression-era Chicago, Harper Curtis finds a key to a house that opens on to other times. But it comes at a cost. He has to kill the shining girls: bright young women, burning with potential. Curtis stalks them through their lives across different eras until, in 1989, one of his victims, Kirby Mazrachi, survives and starts hunting him back.

Working with a former homicide reporter who is falling for her, Kirby races against time and reason to unravel an impossible mystery.

Genres: Fiction, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, Time Travel, Science Fiction, Crime

391 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2013

About the author

Lauren Beukes is an award-winning, best-selling novelist who also writes screenplays, TV shows, comics and journalism. Her books have been translated into 26 languages and have been optioned for film and TV.

Her awards include the Arthur C Clarke Award, the prestigious University of Johannesburg prize, the August Derleth Prize, the Strand Critics Choice Award and the RT Thriller of the Year. She’s been honoured in South Africa’s parliament and most recently won the Mbokondo Award from the Department of Arts and Culture, celebrating women in the arts for her work in the Creative Writing field.

She is the author of Broken Monsters, about art, ambition, damaged people and not-quite-broken cities, The Shining Girls, about a time-travelling serial killer, the nature of violence, and how we are haunted by history, Zoo City, a phantasmagorical noir set in Johannesburg which won the Arthur C Clarke Award and Moxyland, a dystopian political thriller about a corporate apartheid state where people are controlled by their cell phones. Her first book was a feminist pop-history, Maverick: Extraordinary Women From South Africa’s Past, which has recently been reprinted.

Her comics work includes Survivors' Club, an original Vertigo comic with Dale Halvorsen and Ryan Kelly, the New York Times-bestselling graphic novel, Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom with Inaki Miranda, and a Wonder Woman one-shot for kids, “The Trouble With Cats” in Sensation Comics, set in Mozambique and Soweto and drawn by Mike Maihack.

Her film and TV work includes directing the documentary, Glitterboys & Ganglands, about Cape Town’s biggest female impersonation beauty pageant. The film won best LGBT film at the San Diego Black Film Festival.

She was the showrunner on South Africa’s first full length animated TV series, URBO: The Adventures of Pax Afrika which ran for 104 half hour episodes from 2006-2009 on SABC3. She’s also written for the Disney shows Mouk and Florrie’s Dragons and on the satirical political puppet show,ZANews and Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s South African Story.

Before that she was a freelance journalist for eight years, writing about electricity cable thieves, TB, circumcision, telemedicine, great white sharks, homeless sex workers, Botswana’s first female high court judge, and Barbie as a feminist icon for magazines ranging from The Sunday Times Lifestyle to Nature Medicine, Colors, The Big Issue and Marie Claire.

She lives in Cape Town, South Africa with her daughter.

www.laurenbeukes.com
Twitter.com/laurenbeukes Instagram.com/laurenbeukes Facebook.com/laurenbeukes

Awards & Achievements
2015 South Africa’s Mbokondo Award for Women In The Arts: Creative Writing
2014 August Derleth Award for The Shining Girls
2014 Strand Critics Choice Award for The Shining Girls
2014 NPR Best Books of the Year Broken Monsters
2014 LA Times Best Books of the Year Broken Monsters
2013 University of Johannesburg Literature Prize for The Shining Girls
2013 RT Thriller of the Year for The Shining Girls
2013 WHSmith Richard & Judy BookClub Choice
2013 Exclusive Books’ Bookseller’s Choice for The Shining Girls
2013 Amazon Best Mysteries and Thrillers for The Shining Girls
2011 Kitschies Red Tentacle for Zoo City
2010 Arthur C Clarke Award for Zoo City

Reviews

[Stephen King]

No, not the twins from the Kubrick movie, but the targets of a serial killer who finds a time portal in Chicago during the Depression and jackrabbits his way through recent American history, killing women and taking trophies. Until, that is, he encounters a tuff girl who’s not so easy to do away with. It’s the black-hole version of The Time Traveler’s Wife.

[karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

love her, not sure about the show yet...

*******************************

SQUEEE!



this book is going to end up being the "it" book of the summer, and probably beyond, because some of you are slow to catch on, and it deserves a longer "it" cycle.

it is about a time traveling serial killer.

which sounds like drunken-mad-libs, but it works. time travel (the idea of time travel) frequently either makes my head hurt,



or is just too silly for me to care about



but this one is different. the time travel is never given any scientific justification - it just is and you accept it or you read a different book. a man finds a magic house that is both his and not-his, whose door opens to different points in the past, and it is filled with objects that he both recognizes and doesn't-recognize. are we having fun yet?

basically, these objects create a pull in him, a need to move through time to track down the girls to whom these objects belonged, to take/to have taken these things from them when they were young and when he first identifies them as one of his "shining girls" and then to return to them years later, and murder them.

so it is his story and their stories, and the story of the one who got away without him knowing. hunter, hunted, and magic house in a chronological tangle that works perfectly.

in a way, it reminded me of life after life, because as each shining girl is introduced, you can't help but feel a character-attachment to them even though you know what is coming, just like you knew ursula was going to come to a bad end over and over, but you couldn't help feeling optimistic that maybe this time will be the time she makes it through.

i've also heard it being called "dragon tattoo with time travel,"and while it has shades of that in its mutilating of women/female vigilante aspect, this one doesn't have any gratuitous sexual violence for the book to spend way too much time describing, and it has real recognizable characters that aren't cartoons.

girls who shine seem to grow up to be women with purpose, women who subvert traditional gender roles to become welders in wartime or fight their way into a boys-club architecture firm, or who have the potential to change opportunities for women as they assist in abortion clinics or encourage young women-at-risk to overcome their circumstances. but this might be overthink: the murders are gendered, obviously, but there isn't a lot of time spent on motive, because there isn't motive. it is more chilling
because there is no real reason for it except a compulsion - a gut-based instinct rather than a measured philosophy about why these girls. they shine through time, and that is enough, but there isn't a connective thread, except the one he creates by killing them and swapping their totemic-objects. and he makes mistakes along the way. with girls who lose their shine, with falling for appearances, with experimenting with his methodology, and with accidentally leaving kirby alive. this is not a preternatural mastermind; just a man with a twisted need to kill who happened to stumble upon a magic house.

and the story is horrifying, obviously. the murders are graphic, to those of you who know who you are and have limits. there will be entrails. and a sad dog story that somehow gets sadder.

but at the same time, it can be genuinely funny. kirby is great. she is tough without coming across as a cartoon, like lisbeth does. you love her because she has overcome but still remains so normal. not a victim, but not some superior vigilante, either. she definitely takes charge of her situation, but she still has soft edges; she is not caricature. and she shines.

greg was just telling me a couple of weeks ago
and then wrote in his review of the book that with lethem's female character in dissident gardens, lethem keeps telling you she is smart and sexy but you never really see it as a reader because he's not great at writing women. here, you see all of kirby: her vulnerability, her love and irritation with her mother, her frustration with her symbolic status as "survivor", her anger and her determination and her drive to finding answers that will sometimes land her into uncomfortable situations. and you can see why she was singled out to begin with.

definitely make this part of your summer reading list.

come to my blog!

[Wendy Darling · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here's the thing about this book: it is a mash-up of many different genres, and while the execution was perfectly fine, I felt none of them were showcased in a way that was particularly...outstanding?

A breakdown of some of the different elements this book tries to incorporate, along with a few thoughts on each:

Time travel: the jumps in timeline in this book involve a weird house in Chicago in the 1930s. It shows Harper Curtis all the girls he's yet to kill, and allows him to slip in and out of different periods to spy on, have brief cryptic interactions with, and eventually kill his victims. That's basically as much explanation you'll get. I didn't necessarily mind this at first, even though a little more detail might've been nice.

I'm not really sure why time travel was used in this book, however--it added so little by way of the coolness/interest factors that you could have taken out this plot device entirely and the book would have been pretty much the same animal. The House's presence confuses me greatly--is this supposed to be a this place'll drive you crazy thing, a la The Shining?

Serial killer: Those girls shine to Harper, oh, they do! But why? Although I appreciate that this isn't a panting, pervy book, we're not given enough reasons why these girls shine to him. Serial killers, especially ones patient enough to wait so long before acting on their desires, are often methodical creatures of habit whose insatiable impulses do have rhyme and reason--at least to the killers. What's triggering Harper? Something is, and yet I never felt like I understood what made one girl call out to him over another. And when so much of the book takes place from his POV, it's a problem if you don't understand him to some degree.

There are a few moments that bordered on the uncomfortable, but this story doesn't really commit fully to exploring or even showing us the twisted psychology of a man fixated on stalking little girls from their childhood. Yeah, there are scenes that may shock you if you don't read/watch a lot of thrillers, but it's all pretty dispassionately displayed. Like THERE, now there are entrails on the floor--see those? Harper pulled those out. Now he's going to move on, and you should, too.

Horror/Thriller: Tension. This book could have used more of it.

Historical detail: I suppose there must have been historical markers for the different time periods, but I can tell you that a few weeks after finishing it, I don't remember a single one.

Victim POV/human interest: This is the part that's supposed to make you sympathetic and provide a human element to this story. Kirby, one of the girls he preyed upon, made it out alive. She's investigating her would-be killer in the year 1989, and the even accepting the freedom and tools she has to do it, it all pretty much amounts to nothing because the killer comes to find her. She doesn't really move the story forward in a dynamic way, she's pretty much just there for us to feel sorry for her.

I will say there was one victim POV that did make me feel pity for her--but it's the only scene in the book that I remember made me feel any real emotion.

Romance: This relationship felt utterly predictable, pointless, and lacking in any genuine connection. I'm not even going to spend any time talking about it because it felt so sketched out.

Overall, I just feel like I've read bits and pieces of this book before in various different forms, and they've all previously been executed with more focus and originality and thought and research.

Despite my laundry list of things I felt could have been further explored, it was an interesting read; unfortunately, I just didn't love it the way so many of my friends have. Have I just read too many gruesome serial killer books to be that impressed by this? Maybe so. Or maybe mash-ups of so many different genres leave too little room for any one of them to be as thoroughly developed as I'd hoped for.

An advance copy was provided by the publisher for this review.

PS--This one was just optioned for a television series, which is probably a smart choice over film. It's getting a lot of buzz as this year's Gone Girl as well, so expect to see this one on a lot of shelves.

[Jill · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is weird. The climax features a one-sided snowball fight. And it’s about a time-traveling serial killer. It’s weird. It’s also not very good.

The Shining Girls is a book of parts, and some parts work, some parts don’t. Each chapter focuses on a person and a time. Harper, the time-traveling serial killer, spends most of his chapters in the Great Depression Era, plotting escapades to the future to kill “shining girls.” The other main character is Kirby, a shining girl from the early 90s who survives Harper’s homicide attempt. She partners with Dan—a loveable Chicago Sun-Times reporter who was my favorite character—to catch her killer. If a chapter title read Kirby 24 June 1992, I would read with gusto. If a chapter title read Harper 18 January 1932, I’d groan and settle in for an unenjoyable chapter. It’s problematic when you don’t want to read any of the antagonist’s boring, tedious, and repetitive chapters since they amount to more than half the book.

I picked this book up after hearing the phrase “time traveling serial killer.” But Lauren Beukes doesn’t sufficiently develop either of these ideas. The time travel seems like a gimmick. Harper finds a House with a Room full of objects and names of shining girls he will kill decades in the future. He can walk out of this House into a different time to hunt these women. I don’t really understand the House or the rules of time traveling here. Harper often loops his own narrative, hopping from a later time to an earlier time with seemingly no consequences. Structurally, the time traveling is difficult to follow. As I said, each chapter is headed with the character’s name and the date, but when I’m reading fast and the chapters are short, I lose track of “when” I am in the text. The intricacies of Harper’s sojourns back and forth through Chicago were lost on me. And since we jump from past to future, events are spoiled long before they ever happen. Beukes could have used this foreknowledge to create great dramatic irony and tension, but the way she used it only lessened my appreciation of the narrative. I knew what was going to happen, but I wasn’t pushed to fear what was going to happen. A linear narrative would not have worked for this story, but—if this makes any sense—I would have appreciated a more linear non-linear story.

As a serial killer story, it fails as well. Why do I read murder novels? To (attempt to) understand a killer’s motivations. To admire the tenacity of a victim. Or to empathize with the devastation of a victim. To figure out whodunit. Yet all of that was absent here. For the excess of Harper chapters I suffered through, I still don’t understand him as a person. Unlike many popular serial killers, Harper is neither charming nor horrifying; he merely kills. Kirby is a likeable protagonist, but her motivation to find her killer is the most striking aspect of her character. Not much else defines her. And while this story is a mystery to Kirby, it is never a mystery to the reader who knows the killer and his secrets from the first page.

One thing that impressed me about The Shining Girls was Beukes’s research. Chicago is an important part of this novel. The time and characters may change, but Chicago remains constant. The research is impeccably detailed and thus, Chicago breathes with life. But as I’ve noticed with other historical novels, especially those set in bright American metropolises during sumptuous eras, the author can become indulgent with the depth of her research. There’s too much here. It’s too referential. Often it feels like a famous Chicago landmark is alluded to merely because the author had seen it in her research. And despite all the research, I’m surprised by the way the dates are written in the chapter headings. Perhaps it’s an editorial error, but the dates are written in the date/month/year format—e.g., 1 July 1989—even though this book is the American edition and it is set entirely in America. Even in the non-American editions, it would be more authentic to use our admittedly backward month/date/year format.

Thematically, The Shining Girls shines a little brighter. Harper’s pursuit of “shining girls” is a good metaphor for the way a patriarchal society punishes girls with promise, wanting to push them back to their “proper” place. And the idea of a House that dictates who Harper will kill years into the future well represents the idea of a true psychopath. Once Harper finds the House, he appears to have no control over himself. Harper was meant to kill, is meant to kill, will always be meant to kill. He is a killer in every iteration of time and space.

I’ve written a lot about a book I didn’t really like. If you want Chicago and history and murders, read The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson instead. 1. it happened in real life 2. it has Ferris Wheels.

[°°°·.°·..·°¯°·._.· ʜᴇʟᴇɴ Ροζουλί Εωσφόρος ·._.·°¯°·.·° .·°°° ★·.·´¯`·.·★ Ⓥⓔⓡⓝⓤⓢ Ⓟⓞⓡⓣⓘⓣⓞⓡ Ⓐⓡⓒⓐⓝⓤⓢ Ταμετούρο Αμ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ένα συγκλονιστικό, πρωτότυπο και ανατρεπτικό ψυχολογικό θρίλερ.
Καταφέρνει να συνδυάσει το παραφυσικό και το παράλογο με το ρεαλιστικό και το αναμενόμενο δημιουργώντας μια τέλεια σκοτεινή και αποκρουστική ατμόσφαιρα γύρω από τα γεγονότα και τους πρωταγωνιστες.
Η χρονική εναλλαγή και η παράλληλη αφήγηση μέσα στην ιστορία δίνουν ακόμη περισσότερο ενδιαφέρον και αίσθηση μυστηρίου μπροστά στα απρόβλεπτα που συμβαίνουν και που κατα σατανικη σύμπτωση ειναι ολα προκαθορισμένα εξαρχής.
Δεν υπάρχει ίχνος ασάφειας ή κρυμμένης αλήθειας που που προσπαθεί να εξάψει τη φαντασία και τη σκέψη του αναγνώστη.
Από την πρώτη στιγμή αναρωτιέσαι πως γίνεται να καταλαβαίνεις τα ακατανόητα και να εξηγείς τα ανεξήγητα σε όλες τις δραστηριότητες και τα συμβάντα της μαύρης ιστορίας μας.
Σίγουρα η συγγραφέας παίζει αριστοτεχνικά με τη σκέψη και την φαντασία μας έχοντας τεράστιο ταλέντο στην τεχνική των διαλόγων και την περιγραφή αποκρουστικών εικόνων.

Κάπου βαθιά στο τούνελ των φρικιαστικών γεγονότων που συμβαίνουν υπάρχει ένα μικρό φωτακι αμφισβήτησης από την κοινή λογική του αναγνώστη προς τον τροπο σκέψης και αιτιολόγησης καταστάσεων που διαδραματίζονται σε όλη την πλοκή του βιβλίου, όμως αν δεν υπάρχει και αυτή η πινελιά παραφυσικών στοιχείων και υπάρξεων δεν θα υπάρχει και το πραγματικό ψυχολογικό έναυσμα για τα παιχνίδια του μυαλού.

Το απόλαυσα μέχρι την τελευταία σελίδα και το συστήνω ανεπιφύλακτα στους λάτρεις του είδους ...


Καλή ανάγνωση!!
Πολλούς ασπασμούς.

🌟💫✨⚡️💫🌟✨🌟💫⚡️

[Madeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's not easy to sell people on the concept of The Shining Girls, because every time I try to describe the plot, I can't do it without making this sound like the dumbest possible idea for a book.

This is a story about a time-traveling serial killer.

See? It sounds so dumb and so bad. And if you read it and came to the same conclusion, I would not blame you at all. But, much like the cranked-to-eleven lunacy of The Girl on the Train, this book just worked for me. In essence, this is a very, very dumb idea for a story that has been executed very, very well (which is also how I describe Pacific Rim, a movie where humans build giant robots to fight giant aliens and it's actually one of the best movies I've ever seen).

Our killer is Harper Curtis, and while on the run from gangsters in 1930's Chicago, he discovers that he can time-travel. Specifically, he finds a house that acts as a sort of portal to other time periods - and only Harper Curtis has the key.

The specifics and the logic of how and why Curtis decides to use this power to hunt and kill women across time does not matter - the point is that he does, and one of his victims manages to survive.

Kirby Mazrachi is in college in 1989 when Harper Curtis attacks her and leaves her for dead. She makes a physical recovery, but becomes obsessed with finding the man who tried to kill her. To do this, she applies for an internship at the Chicago Sun-Times with a sports writer who used to cover homicides, and enlists his help tracking down her attempted murderer. The chapters move back and forth across time, showing us the various murders that Curtis commits while, in the present, Kirby attempts to find a pattern of unsolved murders that will lead her to the man who tried to kill her. Curtis, we realize, does not kill at random. Each of his victims is, in his mind, a girl who "shines" across time, enabling him to locate her. It's not made totally clear what he means by "shining" but each woman is doing something revolutionary or noteworthy when Curtis cuts her life short.

(this is the point in the review where I'm very tempted to say that Kirby is in "a race against time" or something like that. I'll let you know that I resisted that impulse, but not happily)

Look, I'll come right out and say that book is not for everyone. The violence is detailed and gruesome, particularly the scene where Curtis first attacks Kirby and we see every horrible action. The deaths and brutalization of women and animals alike are described, and it's exactly as upsetting as it should be. Other reviewers have pointed out, and I agree, that all of Curtis's victims besides Kirby never get to be anything other than victims - each is introduced to the reader and given a backstory just to make sure that we understand how upsetting and sad her death is, and that's all we see of them. Also Kirby has a romance subplot that really didn't work for me, first because it was a distraction from the central plot, and also because I have a sneaking suspicion that Beukes included it to show us that Kirby is recovering from her trauma, as if the best way to "fix" a woman is to give her a man. But May-December romances have never been my particular thing, so maybe that's why it didn't work for me.

This is honestly more of a three-star book, but I'm giving it an extra star because Beukes made two very, very good choices in her storytelling and I have to give her credit for them. First, she sets parameters for Curtis's time travel abilities - he cannot travel further back in time than 1929, and this means that we don't have to go through some idiotic revelation that Curtis was actually Jack the Ripper or something (or, considering the Chicago location, HH Holmes). And the second very, very good thing Beukes does is a spoiler, so I'm going to hide it. So Kirby is raised by a single mom, and doesn't know who her father is. About halfway through the book, a terrible thought occurred to me: oh Jesus, are we going to find out that Curtis had sex with Kirby's mother during one of his time-travel jaunts, and he's Kirby's father and that's why they have this connection oh god no no no nooooo. It would have been an awful twist, and Beukes could have easily gone that route, and thank god she didn't, because otherwise I would have had to explain to the nice people at the library that I couldn't return The Shining Girls because I had thrown it into a river There are some plot twists that are better left unwritten, and I'm glad Beukes resisted the impulse to write that one.

One-sentence review summary: The Shining Girls is definitely an acquired taste, and I was just lucky that it happened to be mine.

[Lyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes, first published in 2013, is fascinating, almost hypnotic, for many reasons, but emphatically because its style and subject matter makes it an odd fit for clearly defined genres.

Combining elements of horror, murder mystery, thriller, crime, and time travel fantasy this book finds itself on a unique bookshelf and Beukes demonstrates her rare gift of imagination and technical ability.

Using a shifting perspective, jumping chronological narrative technique that works brilliantly with the time travel elements of the story, Beukes’ prose is tight and fast paced. Her characterizations are also spot-on, complex and humanistic; with a very likeable strong female protagonist and a wholly deplorable antagonist.

Especially good are her sketches of the victims, Beukes crafts them into three dimensional, real, blood and soul people. Good enough for Stephen King or Richard Matheson, behind it all is a deliciously mysterious haunted house.

No mistake, this is a novel about a time traveling serial killer and the necessary contextual violence will be too much for some readers, but it also appears that this South African author is a baseball fan, so I liked it even more.

A very good read.

[Beth · Rating 1 out of 5]

Quick caveat to apologising for not reading or reviewing so much anymore. I'm an English Lit student and it's pretty much killed reading for pleasure for me. But along came "The Shining Girls", and Karen's review compares it to "Gone Girl", one of my favourites and the big buzz book of summer 2012 and I need to get on this shit.

Then I read it.

And I don't know what's wrong with me, but it's as simple as this - I don't understand the hype.

Looking at the blurb, I do. The premise is both devilishly simple and rich with possibility. The marketing is excellent; the blurb is fascinating, the comparisons apt.

What a shame about the book.

Okay, that may be a little harsh. But understand that this review comes from a place of deep disappointment and confusion.

The Shining Girls is bland. I never thought I would type that word when I looked at the gorgeous cover, the spooky blurb or listened to the crazy hype. I thought I could be disappointed or disgusted possibly, but I never thought I'd be so...lost. For a novel that seems so genre-based, it lacks distinctly in any kind of plot. For a novel that strives to be both genre-based and literary, it meanders through cheap exploitation and genre cliche.

Harper, a drifter from the 1920s, kills women who "shine" through history. Why are they chosen? No idea. Possibly because they could make things different for women throughout history, and they try to help women. This is fascinating to me. Beukes's ladies are all awesome women helping each other, who are my favourite kind of people, especially book people. But they all seem rather...low-rent examples of this principle, or maybe Beukes was afraid of stimulating some of the more tricky areas of fantasy/sci-fi (especially to the uninitiated reader, as The Shining Girls is very mass-appeal - which is not a bad thing at all), like alternate history. These women were radical, but I wondered if they were really the best examples of proto-feminism that Beukes could dig up, especially as Harper is motivated to do most of this by a magic house. Kirby, for instance, does nothing of any great interest or significance, mostly piecing together parts of history that the reader already knows or quickly finds out. Since this has all happened already in the past, Kirby has very little effect on any of it.

For those reasons, the time-travel/speculative element of The Shining Girls is pretty much a wash. Beukes does nothing interesting or remotely surprising with it. It has no noticeable effect on the plot. Harper wanders between time periods with their occasional "this is the 1970s/1990s/1930s" markers in the same way that a serial killer from a standard crime fiction novel might move between cities. Her attempts to combine the speculative element with the crime fiction element are admirable - is the house evil, or does Harper make it evil? how much control does Harper have over which women to choose? - and possess interesting potential, but the answer to these questions is mostly "to some degree" (no definitive answers). Beukes tries to be ambiguous but ends up vague and abstract. All that is solid melts into air.

This is mostly achieved by Beukes's workmanlike writing and the total lack of character depth. Harper is a bogeyman, utterly defined by the horrible things he does and lacking anything of a character beyond it. Kirby is slightly better, another feisty-but-damaged protagonist, albeit one with something a little more interesting about her, though her so-called romance is dreadful. There's no insight that will surprise anyone even passingly familiar with crime fiction. I've always wanted more female characters in crime with depth, too, so I was initially hopeful that this book might buck the trend with genuinely vivid female characters in the other time periods.

No. They die. Over and over and over and my eyes glazed over by the end of it. Every other chapter of "The Shining Girls" reminded me of the standard crime prologue, where a woman is introduced, given a shred of depth in a few paragraphs, then brutally killed to set the tone for the Bad Guy. Over and over and over. These horrendous segments earned this book the one star rating. It wasn't the horrible violence that I opposed. Beukes is less graphic in places than many other writers - though, seriously, more pretty and promising twenty-something women being killed? These felt manipulative, cheap and repulsive. Of course they moved me at points. Can you read a chapter about a strong woman being brutally murdered and begging to see her children again because she's too young to die and not be moved? I doubt it, though I did feel beaten into apathy by it all when the ridiculous climax rolled around. At least there's only a couple of this in most books.

I'm sorry, guys. Read Karen's review instead. She loved it and she gave it an excellent review. I was so bitter by this dry, miserable book that I found myself genuinely wondering if any of the people who've buzzed about it have actually read it.

[Arah-Lynda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of course I have pet peeves, don’t we all. I am bone weary tired of books being promoted as the next Gone Girl or worse still….just like The Secret History. So just to set the record straight this is nothing like Gone Girl and the only relation I can see to Stieg Larsson’s books is that there is a female survivor, who is not prepared to lay down. Then again a great many books have kick ass female survivors. The problem with this need to categorize some books as being similar to this or that is that all too often the book suffers in comparison. This is no exception.

What we have here is a time travelling serial killer. Very cool concept no doubt. I was just underwhelmed if you will with the execution.

So suspend belief and come along.

Our dirt bag killer, Harper Curtis has found a house in depression era Chicago that is like a portal to both past and future years, thereby allowing our killer to step out the door and into the past or some future Chicago landscape. Inside the house Harper finds objects that seem to cause a compulsion or perhaps a memory of past compulsions within him, which in turn leads him out the door and into another period of time where he finds one of his victims at an early age, allowing Harper to leave one of these objects with her until such time as he can come back and retrieve it and her.

Kirby is one of Harper’s victims. Problem is she didn’t die but survived the horrific attack and is determined to find the brute responsible. She is courageous, with a quick and sarcastic tongue that she uses deftly to keep irritants at bay. Haunted by her past, Kirby is stuck in time, unable to move forward until she can mark paid to her past. This girl needs closure.

The magic house with its time portal and time travelling artifact like objects is never really explained. It is what it is, thereby allowing the reader to fill in the blanks.

And then there are the rest of Harper’s victims and there are many. We meet them at various stages of their life, but a glimpse at best, is all that we are awarded. And so it is that we meet (insert name here). Harper has met her as well and so we know she is destined to die a graphically brutal death. As terrible as it sounds I had a hard time connecting with any of these so called shining girls as the author never really painted their canvass for me. I mean come on if I am going to plunge into the lake then I want to see its murky depths, get pulled in by the undertow, feel the water sluicing off my skin. Instead there I was on the time travelling, serial killers bus as he moved from stop to stop, kill to kill, leaving objects, taking objects, hurtling through time, but I cannot say that I ever really cared about his victims, which in turn meant that I was pretty much just biding my time and waiting for the ride to be over. Kirby of course was the exception which sadly to me conjured this all too omniscient sense of what was to come.

A truly unique concept that I can only wish had been explored a little further, fleshed out more, carved into my empathetic being enough to make me care more about its characters.

So yeah -three - all hype, no heft, but pretty cover, kind of stars.

[Heidi Wiechert · Rating 1 out of 5]

A killer travels through time picking his victims and leaving mementos behind.

I thought I'd venture outside of my comfort zone with The Shining Girls and I certainly managed that. It was far too gory and violent for me.

The trouble is that almost half of the story is told from the killer's point of view. The reader gets a front row seat at the crimes, usually immediately after a series of passages describing the girl so that an emotional connection is formed with the victim.

I was on a run listening to the audiobook... now, let me be honest. I was on a mildly taxing walk listening to the audiobook and I had to turn it off when he attacked Kirby. It was simply too much with all of the horror, violence and the bit with the animal too.

Perhaps if I had been reading a physical book, I could have skimmed the awful bits. But even then, I think it would be safe to say that this was not the book for me.

I was really excited when Beukes introduced the reader to the newsroom of the Chicago newspaper. Her description of the reporter's cubes all stacked up on one another with the sports and feature writers off to the side was eerily accurate to where I work.

I also enjoyed the interactions between Dan and Kirby- those two were snappy and fun.

Overall though, the gore of the story was too much for me. Only recommended for readers who can handle that type of thing.

[Trudi · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a lot for me to love about this book:

1) The main character Kirby is fantastic. She is a survivor (literally), independent, courageous and determined, a bit of a smart ass with a smart mouth. But she's no mere Mary Sue, possessing vulnerabilities and flaws that make her uniquely "Kirby" and nobody else. I found her funny and totally sympathetic. Quite honestly, the entire novel pivots around her. Without her, the intricate house of cards the author builds would collapse in on itself at the slightest shift.

2) The villain Harper is a skeevy, creepy predator, a wholly horrific construct of misogyny and homicidal tendencies. There isn't much depth or nuance to this guy -- he's just a walking talking body of hedonistic impulses and demented desires. We don't get any personal history for him or why he should have become what he's become. We know some of his twisted motivations derive from the magical qualities of "the House" -- but not all of them. You could even argue that "the House" sees the evil in him and draws Harper to itself.

3) It's about time travel in that tangly mind-fuck way that makes my brain itch, a pleasant buzz but one with bite. The mechanics of the time travel are not explained or explored in the ways they usually are in a sci-fi novel. The time travel just exists. There is a "House" that holds the magic and its door opens onto different years of the same city anywhere from the 1930s to the 1990s. It's this "House" that allows for a time traveling serial killer, and for that unique premise alone the book deserves a second look.

What can I say? This book has a lot going for it, and I liked it, I liked it a lot. But not once did I love it. I was intrigued, I played along with the mystery of the time travel, fitting pieces together where I could and trying not to get too caught up in the logic, faulty or otherwise. While Kirby stood out bright as the sun as one of "the Shining Girls", the rest of Harper's victims feel underdeveloped by comparison, almost throwaways, mere plot devices. It was hard not to get them mixed up with each other.

I also felt a tad underwhelmed by Kirby's "hunt" of her attempted killer. The uncovering and following of clues felt clunky, a cobbled together hodge-podge process where results are based more on luck and coincidence than real groundwork and actual "hunting".

This is largely a plot driven piece and if puzzles and the snake eating its own tail nature of time travel appeals to you then definitely check this out. As I was reading it, I was struck by its cinematic qualities, and won't be surprised if The Shining Girls gets optioned for the big screen.

This review is also posted to Busty Book Bimbo

[Diane · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has a great premise: It's a time-traveling serial killer! One of his victims survives and starts to track him down!

However, I was disappointed in the novel and I think it got overhyped. The chapters alternate between different characters and time periods, and the author was juggling too much and couldn't make it gel. The killer, Harper, has so many murder victims that it's difficult to care about them or even to remember who is who. We also don't get any explanation for why Harper was able to time travel by stepping foot inside a certain house, and we don't understand what made some of his victims "shine" to attract him. There is also some badly written dialogue between the girl who survives, Kirby, and a newspaper reporter who helps her track down Harper. And I want to warn sensitive readers that there are several gruesome killing scenes, so cringeworthy that I thought it crossed into torture porn.

After slogging along for several chapters, the action had picked up by page 200, but by then my heart had gone out of the enterprise and I was just trying to get to the end. I give Lauren Beukes credit for taking on such a challenge, and I think this book may be enjoyed more by readers who aren't suffering from serial killer/sociopath fatigue, as I am.

Some reviewers have said The Shining Girls is "this summer's Gone Girl," but I disagree. I think Gillian Flynn is light years ahead of Beukes.

[Kemper · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was going to fire up the time-mower to do this review, but I was scared I’d bump into a homicidal maniac so I left it in the garage this time.

Harper Curtis is a hobo during the Great Depression in Chicago who makes a miraculous discovery when he gains access to a mysterious house that can transport him into the future up until the early ‘90s. Unfortunately, Harper is a psychopath who starts using names and objects in the house to track and murder women in various times. Harper thinks that the house is leading him to girls who ‘shine’ and that killing them will complete some grand design.

Harper engages in a ritual of meeting a girl as a child, then using the house to go to a time when they’re adults and murder them. He tries this game on Kirby Mazrachi and severely injures her, but she miraculously manages to survive his attack. In 1993, Kirby is a college student who is obsessed with tracking down the man who nearly killed her, and she gets an internship at a newspaper to research similar cases. She convinces a former crime reporter turned sports writer named Dan Velasquez to help with her investigation although he thinks there is little chance of turning anything useful up.

This has got an intriguing premise even if it isn't the first time traveling serial killer story I've heard. Beukes has a distinctive writing style that I generally liked, and Kirby was a strong protagonist although I had a hard time believing that any of her bosses at the newspaper would take the kind of crap she regularly dished out from an intern. Still, I didn’t particularly enjoy this book, and that was mainly because of Harper Curtis.

Harper is certainly crazy and evil enough to make a good villain. His attacks on the women are described in graphic detail and his murder attempt on Kirby was particularly brutal and disturbing. But that’s all there is to him. He’s just a crazy guy with a knife who hates women and nothing else. Any history we get is just meant to reinforce that like a story about him torturing farm animals as a kid. Being able to travel through time makes him scarier, but other than that, he’s no different than any other serial killer that we seen a thousand times in fiction.

Part of this may be some bad timing on my part. I’ve been watching the Hannibal TV series as well as rereading some of the early John Sandford Prey novels which featured plenty of murdering whackos so I think I’ve got a case of serial killer burnout. Whether that influenced me or not, I found Harper’s brand of crazy just tiresome after a while since it was all about getting off on making innocent woman suffer.

Maybe if there had been some type of motive for Harper to be killing people all over time, I could have gotten more into it. However, once it was revealed that he was really just closing time loops he had created rather than being guided by some force related to the house, I lost interest in him completely.

As Trudi pointed out in her review , Kirby’s investigation doesn’t really accomplish much either. The climatic moments come from coincidence and happenstance, not because of any brilliant deductions. That doesn’t make for much of a satisfying pay-off when the book spends so much time detailing how consumed Kirby is with digging through old files and tracking down similar cases.

It’s an interesting blend of crime and sci-fi, but I wish it’d been a little more intriguing on the sci-fi side and had a little less of the typical fictional serial killer on the crime side.

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

The one thing that impresses me the most about this book is the sheer ambition.

I mean, it's a Mystery cat-and-mouse game told from killer who can hop through time from Depression Era through the early nineties, getting his depraved game of meeting little "shining" girls and coming back moments later when they're all grown up to brutally murder them.

And then we also get a heavily researched and deeply characterized slew of female victims that reads more like a brilliant historical novel than what could have been a few hops and slashes with vague settings... No. Beukes does all her research and does it right. I'm damn impressed.

The rest of the plot is still a cat-and-mouse from the PoV of a girl who had gotten away, learned to live with being eviscerated, and who set herself on the path of piecing together this mystery killer against all odds, getting in tight with an ex-murder-investigator and badgering him to death and often not succeeding. :)

All told, I'm very impressed. It's all about the characters, the settings, and absolutely hating the bastard time-travelling murderer.

I totally recommend this to anyone who's a fan of both mystery and time-travel. :) There's a lot of gory goodness.

[Wanda Pedersen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Just wow.

I'm amazed at the mixed reviews that this book has received. I loved it.

A time traveling serial killer. A girl who survived his attack. She tries to put her life back together and to put an end to his murdering ways.

I felt deliciously drunk on time, as the chapters changed POV and year, but all clearly marked by the title heading. During the last several chapters, my feet were making little running motions and I kept checking to see how many pages of tension were left. That's rare.

What is also rare? The killer doesn't come off as sexy or overly intelligent or all that slick. In short, he is not glorified at all. And the women/girls are truly shining ones--shining with intelligence, potential and determination.

I would recommend this novel highly.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are many, many serial killer novels out there, but not one that is quite like this. Featuring a killer, who stumbles onto a house that lets him travel through time to find what he calls, his "shining girls." Girls that are so full of life he is compelled to extinguish their flame. How does one possibly catch a killer that can kill and then escape to another time. He does leave a few clues, and Kirby, who did not die and is the one who got away, wants nothing more than to hunt him down. I loved that this is set in Chicago, and we are shown Chicago all the way through the thirties to the nineties. I just read that this highly inventive novel has been optioned by DiCaprio's production company, for television. Although at times it did get confusing, what year when, the concept mattered more than the details and as I read it did get easier. It is pretty descriptive so definitely not for the faint of heart, but I was thoroughly entertained.

[Althea Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm now all caught up with Lauren Beukes! Write more! :-)

Beukes is one of my favorite authors, and this is an excellent novel. I do have to say, however, that for me, it might be the least striking and remarkable of her works, although I believe it is her most critically-acclaimed.

It's a cross-genre mashup of a time-travel story and a serial killer/murder mystery.
Harper Curtis has always been a psychopathic killer. But when the hobo, back in 1939, wanders into a seemingly-abandoned house that's strangely well-appointed inside, he realizes he's stumbled onto a way to travel between times. But the house seems to demand something specific from him: it makes certain young women shine with a compelling brilliance, driving Curtis to pick them as his victims, stalking them through the years. How can investigators track down a killer who is no longer there to be caught, having absconded to a different decade?

That's just the task that Kirby Mazrachi, all unknowing, has set herself. She may be the only one of Curtis' victims to survive: after a brutal attack in 1989, she was left for dead, and the killer is unaware that she is still alive. Kirby is determined to solve her own 'case' even though the cops have given it up. She's pursued investigative journalism, and her internship at a newspaper office has given her a working relationship with a former homicide reporter. He's reluctant to turn back to the traumas of crime after moving on to the sports world - but Kirby is nothing if not tenacious.

Good stuff - nicely plotted, beautifully written.

[Shelby *trains flying monkeys* · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book way more than I actually did. The premise of it sounds wonderful. A time traveling serial killer? Color me intrigued.
The thing was this book reads so slow that I kept falling asleep.
There's a house that allows this cray cray man to travel across time. Spotting girls that "shine" and going back later when they have grown up and killing them. Brutally.
I thought the "shine" thing would draw me in since I loved that theme in The Shining and Doctor Sleep. Nope.
There are some good moments in this book but for me they just didn't keep up with the snoozes.
I gave it a 2 star just because I managed to finish it.

[J · Rating 2 out of 5]

So disappointing.

Beukes must have an incredible agent, because the buzz around this book was crazy. I expected a feminist science fiction thriller, where an alternative, parallel history of revolutionary women is wiped out by an agenda-driven killer. This book turned out to be a run-of-the-mill slasher novel with an unexplained time-travel element.

I don’t even mind that the time travel wasn’t explained. What bothered me was that there wasn’t any point to it. It isn’t as though Beukes made any interesting exploration of history or the role of women in America. Instead, the historical characters are just cartoons. So, you have Rosie the Riveter woman in the ‘40s, the woman in the ‘50s who is caught up in the McCarthy witch hunts, and the woman in the ‘70s who provides illegal abortions. There’s no character development beyond the fact that they each exemplify their era in a shallow, formulaic way. It’s like Jack the Ripper decided to kill all the American Girl Dolls.

In fact, all the characters – historical or not -- are cartoonish. Beukes never develops her characters at all, beyond their rudimentary type – and Beukes’ understanding of her rudimentary types (artist, finance guy, homeless guy) is childish and simplistic in the extreme. This was most annoying when it came to the ethnic characters. Has Lauren Beukes never met an actual person of color? Her depictions are total caricatures – as though they’re based purely on a cursory reading of a Newsweek article about the inner city, or that Tiger Mother book. They talk and behave nothing like real people. (It bothered me that Beukes chose to write the chapters about the African American homeless guy basically in dialect. First of all, her imitation of the idiom is embarrassingly bad. Second, she doesn’t use nonstandard spellings of common vernacular pronunciations for white people – so, why does she do it for this one character?).

There are a lot of other problems with this book. Beukes is terrible at writing dialogue – instead of talking to each other, her characters speak in weird contorted ways in order to dump information on the reader. Her historical-cultural references all feel like they came out of a Wikipedia entry. And I don’t even want to think about the horrible romance subplot.

The book does have some good moments. Some of the writing is very skillful, at least when the author isn’t trying to imitate human speech or interaction.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

My problem lately with books is that I have been generally enjoying what I've been reading, but I just haven't had much to say about them once I'm done.

Time-travelling serial killer. Bad-ass punk/hardcore grrrrl* who he failed to kill when he had the chance. Chicago.

That's my plot summary. I don't think when I was recently recommended to try to write a review in four sentences or less that is what the guy had in mind.

Why didn't Harper just go back in time to right after he had stabbed Kirby and finish her off then, or at least find another time to go after he rather than right after she figured out what was going on? I'm sure there is a logic to this that I just missed, that's my one gripe with the book

I enjoyed this a lot. It did take me over a week to read, but that's just because I wasn't reading much at home and there something in my bag that likes to stain some things that go in my bag and not other things. It seems to only mess up things that are nice and this book looks quite nice. And it's signed. So I figured there was no chance it would survive my mysterious bag and what I'm calling time travelling staining shit. Because, seriously, I've gone through it, and I can find nothing in the bag that should be making some things but not others come out dirty and stained.

Here is the signature in the book, since I mentioned it. And because Karen showed hers, and it's polite to show yours too when a lady shows hers. It's never polite to just show yours first totally unprompted.**



Will I say anything about the book? Ok one more mini-gripe. I hope if you didn't read the book you didn't read gripe one.

I groaned a little bit when Kirby went to a Naked Raygun show. There seemed to be so much research put into the book, getting little details correct and stuff and then Naked Raygun? Not that I'm saying it's historically inaccurate, but if you asked me right now, "Hey Greg I'm writing a story that takes place in Chicago in the early 90's and I want to let her go to a punk show, what band should she be seeing?" I'd answer Naked Raygun. If you asked me to give a different band for another show she'd be seeing a few nights later that was also from Chicago I'd stare at you blankly and have nothing to give you (were Los Crudos around by that time? I think Kirby would like Crudos quite a lot)***

Part two of my mini-gripe of minutiae in the book that doesn't really matter is that Kirby shows up in one secne wearing a Fugazi t-shirt. Of course there is no such thing as a Fugazi t-shirt, there is a This Is Not a Fugazi t-shirt, and I think some mall stores I remember had some kind of bootleg Repeater shirt for sale with Guy all tangled up in guitar chords, but Kirby doesn't strike me as the type who would buy her punk shirts at the early 90's equivalent of Hot Topic (or whatever the modern day equivalent is) and at that point in time wearing a Fugazi t-shirt was kind poseurish, along the same lines of some kid getting all bent out of shape because someone said Primus Sucks, when everyone knows that meant you liked them (which is a terrible example, because there really is no winner in coolness on either side of that exchange, but even if Fugazi's 1993 album was sort of a disappointment to people I knew, they still had a mystique about them that you didn't want to tarnish by putting on a Brockum (they made most of the rock shirts at that time, and maybe still do)
copyrighted This is Not a Fugazi shirt. What shirt would I have put her in? I don't know, maybe some other Dischord band that wasn't so 'pure' as Ian and co.

But really these aren't even worth complaining about, and I mean that even though I've spent most of the review blabbing about it.

If you were reading this review to find out if maybe you want to try this book that people keep calling this summer's Gone Girl, I'm sorry. You shouldn't have had to read this nonsense. But, lots of people are saying this. I've heard it from all kinds of people where I work and I don't think they are all just parroting each other. It's not like Gone Girl redux, obviously, but it's a strong thriller type story with a strong female presence. But I'm sorry for wasting your time.

But thank you for reading.


*There are no Olympia refrences in the book, but her story takes place in 1993. Reviewer liberties.

**And because Karen and I have worked in a bookstore for a combined total of a quarter of a century we knew to put the dust jacket flap on the page where authors normally sign. But Lauren Beaukes wanted to sign on the page she did, which totally makes sense because there is so much room. I'm not exactly sure why some authors sign only after they cross out their own printed name. Not that I'm judging, because that's how DFW signed and all, I'm just curious why some do that. If only there were a machine in my home that I could just type any stupid question into and get back answers immediately. When will technology come up with something like that?


***I just totally lied. Totally. Of course I know other Chicago bands from that time. Screeching Weasel and those bands that were around with them. Ok, I'm just stupid, but still until a few seconds ago, if you had asked me for a Chicago band in the early 90's you would have gotten Naked Raygun as an answer and a blank stare, probably just because the other bands were still around later in the 90's and I think of them as being from that time period more than from the years that punk broke.

[Kelly (and the Book Boar) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/

A time traveling serial killer, you say?????



I was so ready to amp it up to 1.21 gigawatts and press the accelerator to 88 MPH. But then . . . .

It’s like the author was really late for a meeting with the publishers, and while running down the hallway as fast as possible she drops the whole shebang, chapters scatter, there is no time to put everything back together in the proper order, so she makes the decision to go with whatever arrangement they are in once she picked them back up and Chapter 34 becomes Chapter 1, Chapter 8 becomes Chapter 2, etc., etc.

If you didn’t catch my drift with the giant ramble above, basically The Shining Girls is kind of a mess. The premise sounded great and the first scene in the book grabbed my attention since it reminded me of one of my favorite serial killers



but sadly, the delivery of the remainder failed to keep it.

There was no reasoning behind Harper Curtis being a time traveling killer (A HOUSE telling you that you should become a serial killer is not a good enough answer) – hell there wasn’t much reasoning behind Harper Curtis being a killer at all. Talk about the most one-dimensional bad guy of all time.

Kirby (the final “Shining Girl”) and Dan (her boss/mentor/friend/whatever) were the saving grace that kept me reading. Delete the time travel b.s. and turn the duo into a couple of overzealous reporters trying to link various murders (as well as the attack on Kirby) together in order to prove a serial killer is on the loose and this one could have been a winner.

2.5 Stars, but I’m giving it a bonus ½ Star for Dan being a sports reporter and the tons of references to the Sandberg/Sosa/Grace era of the Chicago Cubs. You can take the girl out of Illinois, but you can’t take the Illinois out of the girl ; )

[Dean · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book as it was listed somewhere as a"Top twenty must-read books of the summer."
I believe it was in "Paste" Magazine, but I am not sure.
I read a lot of "book lists" because I read a lot of books.
It is billed as a "Serial Killer" novel with a twist-Time travel.
OK, I'm sold.
Bring it on!

This book tries so damn hard to be clever that it loses its focus straight out of the gate.
It is so caught up in the vehicle of "time travel" that it becomes snared in the trappings of 'contrived nuance.'
What do I mean by this?
The author (Lauren Beukes) is working, and working to set the mood with some parts heavily laden with detail and it becomes obvious in her efforts to gain your attention.
"Look over here" it screams, "whilst I do this...over here. Voila!"
Ummm...no. Didn't work.
The killings are sometimes quite gory, but rarely did I feel any tension.
I found myself skipping various parts as Beukes breaks character here, adds too much detail there, and leaves you going "huh?" over there (and not the good kind of "huh" one would hope to get from a Thriller).
The character development was completely lacking.
Our protagonist, Kirby, never comes through.
She is a husk of a persona built solely on a little bad upbringing and one major trauma. (see Gillian Flynn's, "Dark Places" for an example of this done well.)
This could have been magnificently done. Alas, it was not.
Protagonist number two is Dan.
Basically, another husk who, when he has, shall we call them, "feelings" he basically pants like a schoolboy. I half-expected him to actually trip over his own tongue at one point like a Looney Tunes character.
He is as sophomoric as some parts of this tale are written.
The character that was best built, the one for whom I felt the most? Harper, our Serial Killer.
This would be just fine if I even thought that Beukes wanted this, but it is apparent that she wants us to feel and root for Kirby and Dan.
If you think I am throwing out spoliers here-not even close.
You find this all out really fast and I am not even getting to the other devices employed.
I will note though, another part that gave to the choppy feel was the jump from victim to victim through time.
While I believe Beukes wanted the reader to see little vignettes, this reader found essence of naught.
I just could not bring myself to care.
Due to this, every time we came back around to Kirby and Beukes would go into some intimate description I could not get through it.
I would scan it knowing exactly the point she was trying to make, exactly what I was to take away and read on from there.
So very transparent.
Good example, about 200 some pages in (yeah-that far) she is describing Kirby going through a box filled with things from her childhood.
I knew exactly what she was looking for and so will you if you read this.
The description of each object, naming them, citing the color, etc. Fraught with detail, but we were so far into this book and so lacking in any character development for Kirby that I really could not care less about her box of mementos.
I found the payout about 1.5 pages later after a quick scan of all the objects being sifted through and I moved on.
Don't even get me started on the ending.

OK, so why am I giving this 2.5 starts instead of 1?

As I noted, Beukes is trying so hard to be clever, but the fact is-the concept is clever!
I don't want to spoil, but the notion of the killer moving through time, escaping some detection and moving around other obstacles-I loved it.
The execution of this concept is just not well done in this book and it was a slow read.

Where Beukes has flashes of brilliance is in her ability to construct a good skeleton for a tale, but the meat was never grafted to the bone.

2.5 stars.

Read it if you are hungry for a serial killer book with some novel conceptualization, but nothing more.

Namaste~
(@camuspam on twitter)

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

The next stop in my time travel marathon (November being Science Fiction Month) was The Shining Girls, a 2013 thriller by Lauren Beukes. Here's a novel I did not cotton to at all through 80 pages. It's written in present tense. It's fragmented, with a few chapters no longer than four pages. The narrative unfolds from at least four different recurring points of view and over ten total. It's a puzzle that fits together at odd angles. It was not going to be my cup of tea. That's what I thought.

The time bending begins in 1974, with a gimp footed creeper named Harper Curtis approaching a little girl named Kirby Mazrachi on a playground. Harper isn't here to hurt the girl, not yet. He seeks to make a memorable impression, but upsets Kirby nonetheless. Before leaving, Harper gives her something, a plastic toy horse. Jumping back to 1931, Harper is chased through a hobo camp for slicing open a man's neck in a card game. He meets a blind woman who has been told to expect him. The blind woman offers Harper a coat. Inside the coat, Harper finds a key to a tenement house, a very special house, on Chicago's west side.

By 1984, a 15-year-old Kirby, raised in Chicago by a free-spirited single mother, is fumbling through her first sexual experience. Across town, the man she met in the playground has disemboweled a 21-year-old economics student. Among the items found on her is a cassette tape featuring Janis Joplin. At the time, no one thinks anything of it. Harper has discovered that the tenement house has an ability to transport him to different eras in Chicago when he concentrates on a different girl, a special girl, a "shining girl", who is destined to fall under his knife. In a bedroom upstairs, personal effects from each of these girls fade in and out of time: a baseball card from 1947, a cassette tape from 1972, a tennis ball from 1989.

In one of the more harrowing scenes I've encountered in a novel, Kirby crosses paths with Harper again in 1989 while walking her dog in a bird sanctuary. She's not expected to live more than a week after she's discovered, but does, and goes on to intern at the Chicago Sun-Times. Kirby chooses to mentor under 46-year-old Dan Velasquez, a divorced sportswriter who still has contacts in the police through his work on the crime beat. The brutality and unsolved nature of Kirby's attack prompted him to look for a new line, but Kirby is not satisfied that her attack was random and begins digging into other unsolved stabbings in the Chicago area.

The most bizarre detail of Kirby's attack is that the killer tossed a vintage cigarette lighter at her as he fled. Researching stabbings in which strange artifacts were left at the scene, Kirby uncovers a murder in 1942 in which one of the victim's aging children swears a Jackie Robinson baseball card was found on their mother. Robinson didn't join the Brooklyn Dodgers until 1947, a fact that Dan easily verifies. Dubbing their suspect The Vintage Killer, Kirby ultimately draws an association between her attack in 1989 and the man she met in the playground in 1976. Digging through her old toys, she finds the plastic horse he left behind and a manufacture date on the object: 1982.

The Shining Girls is the best novel of its kind that I've read since Let the Right One In. It's not only terrifying at turns, but staggered my imagination. The idea of a serial killer traveling through time certainly isn't new; it served as the basis for one of the best time travel movies ever made, Time After Time in 1979. What Beukes does is speculate that if the future of the victims has already been determined, the fate of their killer has been as well. To stop him, it's up to the protagonists to piece together what's going on and what their role should be in ending it.

The narrative becomes a puzzle for Kirby & Dan to piece together, and the author imbues them with a depth and passion I found similar to Oskar & Eli in Let the Right One In. Beukes overcame my unease with present tense and her preference for "telling instead of showing" by telling me about characters who were full of life, vulnerable as they were, well, weird. Like John Ajvide Lindqvist did, dispersing nostalgia throughout her thriller pays off for Beukes:

"You want to watch a video?" she says. So they do. And they end up fumbling around on the couch, kissing for an hour and a half, while Matthew Broderick saves the world on his computer. They don't even notice when the tape runs out and the screen turns to bristling static, because his fingers are inside her and his mouth his hot against her skin. And she climbs on top of him and it hurts, which she expected, and it's nice, which she'd hoped, but it's not world-changing, and afterwards they a kiss a lot and smoke the rest of the cigarette, and he coughs and say: "That wasn't how I thought it would be."

Neither is being murdered.

Beukes writes in an almost graphic novel style that left me wanting through the first 80 pages. I didn't want to be told that Harper fled from a saloon fight, I wanted to see it on the page. The Shining Girls is more work than that. If I'd taken a week to read this, I might have been immune to the virus Beukes introduces. Reading it over the course of Thanksgiving Day, I plowed through without protective measures, gave myself over to the fever and saw things I typically don't in a novel. For example, the fragmented nature gives voices to each of the murdered women. We're invested in their lives and believe that if Kirby survived her attack, maybe they will too.

No punches are pulled in the novel. The violence is harrowing and the suspense is gut wrenching. I would not recommend this to anyone easily upset. But as Tana French points out in her cover blurb, as scary as the book is, it's also "utterly original" and "beautifully written". The experience Kirby has smoking pot with her mother for the first time or the loneliness of a transsexual stripper in 1940 are as vivid and moving as the lyrics a Tom Waits song. I think that a book whose antagonist is a time tripping murderer of women, both extremes should be there, the ugly and the beautiful. Cutting the rougher edged stuff would've been dishonest to the human experience.

In the acknowledgements, Beukes credits "a crack team of researchers" and names no fewer than thirty experts she sought for historical data or that the South African author approached for information on Chicago. "Dedicated" doesn't begin to describe Beukes' commitment that her story feel as real as possible and she bats this one right out of Wrigley Field. I'll be adding more novels by Beukes to my reading list posthaste.

[Apatt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A monster that sucks people's brains out their heads is far less disturbing than a serial killer that stalks and kills girls for no reason. An “equal opportunity” serial killer that kills men as well as women is also less disturbing. I don’t know much about real life serial killers but for some reason their fictional counterparts almost always go after young girls. There is a layer of unreality in the brain sucking monster scenario that makes it not at all disturbing regardless of how graphic the description is, a psycho stalker on the other hand hits a little too close to home for comfort.

The basic plot is very simple though it leads to a fairly complex storyline. In the words of the author:

“Harper, a time-travelling serial killer is untraceable, unstoppable until one of his victims, Kirby, survives and turns the hunt around.”

To my mind The Shining Girls is not science fiction, the mechanics of the time traveling aspect is not explored at all. It is basically just a magic portal in a house. This is fine as it leaves the author free to focus on the ramifications of time travelling on the characters’ lives. The chapters are arranged in a non-linear timeline, helpfully signposted by the year number at the beginning of each chapter. For once the non-linear timeline makes complete sense. Even though it zigzags and is quite twisty Lauren Beukes quite cleverly organized it in such a way that it is easy to follow and also make the narrative very compelling, the timeline is even sequential in narrative terms. However, I was looking forward to some old school “timey wimey” paradoxes like the classic The Man Who Folded Himself or Heinlein’s short story All You Zombies (nothing to do with shambling walking deads). This did not happen in The Shining Girls as Beukes opted for a predeterministic model of time traveling where the future is set in stone and there can be no “Butterfly Effect” (see A Sound of Thunder). Her notion of time travelling is closer to the model used in Audrey Niffenegger's wonderful The Time Traveler's Wife. Nevertheless Beukes did a great job of ensuring that the jumbled up timeline does not collapse from some logical error. Here is a chart that explains how time travel works in The Shining Girls.

In spite of the very compelling narrative where not a single page of the book is boring I do have one main reservation about this book. In several chapters Lauren Beukes introduce us to strong, smart, likeable, talented women only to kill them off at the end of the chapter. Ms. Beukes has a talent for creating vivid and believable characters so it is a little sad and disturbing to see them killed off so senselessly to satisfy a psycho’s craving. Worse still, the same process occurs several times in the book making the storyline a little repetitious and frustrating. Having said that the narrative never bogs down, which is a testament to Ms. Beukes’ talent.

One girl of course survives, Kirby the protagonist. Now, before you complain about spoilers can you imagine a storyline where every single girl is killed off and Harper the psycho is triumphant at the end of the book? That kind of ending would never fly, especially in a New York Times bestseller like this one. Still, Harper does have things entirely his way for more than half the book and it is a little frustrating as Beukes has done too good a job of making him loathsome.

In spite of most of the girls being killed off there is a theme of women’s empowerment here which is admirable, and it does not take precedence over storytelling. Some of the murder scenes are quite violent but not overly gruesome, they are written from the girls’ point of view so the reader can sympathize with them rather than ride on the killer’s shoulders and for some kind of gratuitous thrills a la James Patterson's serial killer novels.

At the end of the day The Shining Girls is a very good, compelling read, my above mentioned gripes notwithstanding. I have a lot of time for Ms. Beukes' writing style, characterization and story ideas, her other books Zoo City, Broken Monsters etc. look intriguing to me and I suspect I may have already become a regular customer.

A very solid 4 stars then.

[Bonnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Everything happens for a reason. He should be grateful. It's because he is forced to leave that he finds the House. It is because he took the coat that he has the key.'

Harper stalks his Shining Girls through time and the House helps him. He visits the girls when they are children, takes mementos from them and tells them he'll be back for them when it's time. When that time comes, he leaves their bodies with a new memento, one taken from a different Shining Girl. His goal is to kill them all, all who Shine, and his mission is complete. Except one survived. And now she's the one looking for him.

The writing style is extremely explicit. The murders are terribly graphic and incredibly detailed so if you can't stomach 'Dexter' you're definitely not going to be able to manage this one. I have quite the stomach for gruesome tales but even this one came close to pushing my boundaries. Added to the gruesome details is the heartbreaking bits. There's this one scene in particular where one of the women is trying to stop the killer and in the process is telling him about her kids and how she has to be there for them because they're going to be waking up soon... I'm not much of a softie for sad times but even that got to me pretty bad. Plus, I think it should be mentioned there's also a gruesome scene involving a dog that may or may not have caused a tear or two.

'He only has to think of a time and it will open onto it, although he can't always tell if his thoughts are his own or if the House is deciding for him.'

Much like what karen says in her review of The Shining Girls, this book reminds me very much of Life After Life despite it's obvious differences. Life After Life isn't technically time-travel but the transitions through time are quite similar, also both novels lack the scientific backing to support the time-traveling, it's either believable or it's not. Both novels had similar writing styles with bouncing back and forth to different times. It shouldn't make sense and it should be terribly confusing and hard to follow but somehow it manages to make complete and utter sense. Lauren Beukes writes with such confidence though that it really leaves no room for questioning. I never had a doubt.

'It's the same tug in his stomach that brought him to the House. That jolt of recognition when he walks into someplace he's meant to be. He knows it when he sees the tokens that match the ones in the room. It is a game. It's a destiny he's writing for them. Inevitably, they're waiting for him.'

This book blew my mind. I finished it late one night and ended up unable to fall asleep because I simply could not stop thinking about it. There were a few questions that went unanswered that I wish had been but my overall opinion of the book remained bright and shiny. (ha, pun intended) The two things I had issue with her major spoilers but I had to include them. Please do not click if you have any intention of reading this!
Kirby spent years investigating, trying to find the man who tried to murder her. In the end, he ended up coming back to her after discovering that he didn't finish the job. The fact that all her researching seemingly amounted to nothing was bothersome. It made me wonder if his other crimes went unsolved or if after being introduced to the House if it made Kirby re-question everything. She saw the Room and saw the names of the other girls so in my mind I'd like to think that even though it wouldn't have been easily proven at the very least she figured it out in the end. Considering the ending was slightly left open to interpretation, that's just my interpretation. :)
Also, we're given back-story on a lot, like regarding Bartek and the money bag and even a short glimpse of who Harper was in his younger years, but the one scene I kept waiting for was how the Room came to be. Each girls name was in Harper's handwriting on the walls, it just made me wonder if the Room came together all at once or if it was pieced together over time as he found each of his Shining Girls.

The Shining Girls is a horrid and nightmarish tale but so completely intense and unforgettable that it's certain to leave a lasting impression. It's a story possessing such vehemence you practically need a good, strong drink to aid you through it. In honor of the drink the House never failed to provide I recommend a whisky straight-up, no ice.

[Tatiana · Rating 3 out of 5]

As seen on The Readventurer

Reading The Shining Girls was like reading Gone Girl all over again. Here I was, expecting an entertaining genre fiction romp, and instead I got a literary, undoubtedly well-written, but mostly boring novel that underutilized its exciting premise.

Sorry to say, but The Shining Girls is just not nearly as entertaining as its blurb leads you to believe. A time-traveling serial killer and the thrilling chase after him lead by his only surviving victim and her journalist friend? Give me some of that!

BUT. Eh. It would have been a better story if time travel, one of my most favorite things in science fiction, wasn't only a gimmick in this story, which is doubly sad because Lauren Beukes is such a skilled science fiction writer. I also would have been better if the mystery and thrill and suspense actually ever materialized. Basically, the whole plot concept here is an excuse to write about these "shining girls," who, in my understanding, are some special women of their own time who are unlike other, regular, women; are pioneers in what they do, so to speak. I might be wrong though. One of the killer's victims is a welder, another - a lesbian architect in a misogynistic 50s firm, and yet another - a social worker. Strong, admirable women? Yes. "Shining"? I don't really know. The shininess of Kirby, our heroine, a regular student with a messed-up family life, is especially unclear. Same applies to several other victims. Not that these girls are not interesting, they are. But why the killer is attracted to them, and why he suddenly needs to kill them, the moment he steps into the time-transporting House, is never fully explained. Time travel in this book is used only to give the author an opportunity to address some women's issues in various decades of the 20th century, and nothing particularly time-twisty ever happens. There are hardly any mind- and time-bending tricks that usually make science fiction about time travel so thrilling. Instead, the serial killer could have been murdering his victims in any period in history. It made little difference as far as the investigation is concerned. What a waste.

I heard a lot that this book will be the BIG book of the summer. It wasn't for me, but maybe it will be for others? The Shining Girls is being promoted as mashup of The Time Traveler's Wife and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and in this case the comparison seems apt in the way that time travel is a gimmick (as it was in the former title) and the main character is a damaged girl who finds help via a journalist (as in the latter). However, there is a bit of too much of The Wife's irrelevant time traveling and meandering pace in The Shining Girls and too little of The Girl's kick-assery and investigating for my taste.

However, I would still strongly recommend Beukes' Zoo City.

[Raven · Rating 5 out of 5]

With a plethora of reviews having appeared already and a good amount of pre-publication publicity hype, I was both keen and intensely curious about this foray into crime from Lauren Beukes, author of the excellent Zoo City and Moxyland.

With a clever and quite unique premise The Shining Girls is something really quite different in crime fiction fare, but I almost fell at the first hurdle I must admit. Stupidly I read the first 50 pages or so in small chunks, racing to finish another book at the same time, so initially I was quite discombobulated by the changing timelines and was quickly losing track of what I had read. So…I started again, reading a larger block which worked so much better and causing me to engage much more with flow of the story and making the different timelines infinitely clearer. Beukes assuredly avoids the inherent pitfalls of changing timelines by ensuring that both the historical and more contemporary storylines are equally engaging, as we follow the dark deeds of Harper Curtis- a time travelling serial killer- and the story of Kirby Mazrachi- a young woman who has survived one of Curtis’ brutal attacks. Beukes transports us through the culturally and socially different periods of American history with ease, demonstrating her breadth of research to make each period perfect in detail and atmosphere. From the shanty towns born out of the Depression era and through the ensuing decades, the reader is instantly fixed in a time and place familiar through the smallest details, as Curtis travels back and forth through time attacking his female victims. It’s a very clever conceit for a story and one that I think Beukes pulls off with aplomb throughout.

I actually really liked the character of Curtis- serial killing psychopath that he is- and the exploration of the contrasting demons within his character. There were moments that you felt he was on the verge of desisting in his crimes, but the strength of his compulsion for killing is ultimately too strong to resist. As the book progresses, a showdown with Kirby, the heroine of the story, is unavoidable and I enjoyed the build-up to Curtis’ realisation that one of his ‘shining girls’ had evaded death at his hands. Kirby is again a compelling character with a wonderful balance of sassiness and a quiet vulnerability at play in her character. Her relationship with Dan, her mentor as an intern at a Chicago newspaper, is deftly handled, with their differences in character and age defining their stumbling but heart warming relationship.

I would say that I do tend to shy away from crime fiction that dips its toe in the realm of the fantastical, but I genuinely enjoyed this intriguing meld of crime and time travel, with the historical detail a major component of my ultimate enjoyment of the book. A different read for me, but one that I would definitely recommend.

[Roxane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent premise, and Beukes takes up interesting themes. Very well-researched. Shallow characters and at times, there doesn't seem to be enough purpose to the violence.

[Debbie W. · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting take incorporating both science fiction (time travel) and thriller!