The Shining Girls: A Novel

What a unique way to tell a thrilling case of murder and suspense. I loved the way the book chapters came from the perspectives of the murderer, victims and Dan. It was really cool to see the various decades everything took place and how it all came together.Kirby is a bad ass, she doesn’t give up on finding the man that left her for dead. She knows he’s been hunting and murdering other women, but the extent of it is unbelievable. Literally and figuratively.I cannot say enough about this book, you just need to read it for yourself!

Lauren Buekes has written another total winner of a novel. I have not yet read anything by her that is disappointing or unsatisfying in any way. The characters are all interesting and multi-faceted. Even the victims, who are usually only roughly sketched in this genre, all feel like people I recognize. The plot moves along at a page turning pace and without the confusing turns and unnecessary paradoxes that plague these types of stories.Still a Lauren Buekes fan.

3.5 stars rounded up The Shining Girls is a mix of time-travel scifi and serial-killer crime fiction, but don't believe the blurb written by Matt Haig on the back cover that says it's a cross between The Time Traveler's Wife and The Silence of the Lambs. Even if, in your wildest imagination, you could mix the two, you still don't come anywhere close to The Shining Girls. Yes, there is time travel and yes there is a nasty serial killer out there, but this killer already knows who he's going to kill and visits his victims beforehand -- and even leaves them a little something to hold on to until he comes back. Bought exclusively for its summer-read/beach potential, the book didn't let me down.In this story, time runs along different chronologies. The serial killer in this novel, Harper Curtis, has his own time line -- he jumps in and out of time from the 1930s until 1993 -- and then there's the timeline of one his victims, Kirby, whom Harper mistakenly leaves alive after a brutal attack. Third, there's the real, historical chronology, time and changing attitudes moving forward in history. It may seem confusing at first, but it makes sense here. As the novel opens, Harper Curtis is running from an angry mob in a Depression-era Hooverville. He runs into a shack, takes a coat and leaves; in one of the pockets is a key. He is drawn to a mysterious house in the city of Chicago, a jumping-off point into time; a place where his destiny, and those of a group of young women he doesn't even know, is literally written on the walls. The women are the shining girls of the title, and he is compelled to track them through time and ultimately to snuff out their glowing potential in the world. Harper visits each one long before he kills them, leaving some token; years later when it's a woman's time to die, he leaves something else with each of them, something from one of the other victims. One of them, Kirby Mazrachi, escapes from a savage attack and her destiny with death, but she is left with both physical and emotional scars. She becomes fixated on finding the person who did this to her, determined enough to the point where she becomes an intern on a newspaper that covered the case because of the access to the paper's archives. She has caught on to the pattern of artifacts left behind, but trying to find someone who will listen to her is pretty much impossible, as is trying to pin down one specific person whom she knows is responsible for a number of other brutal attacks.On a surface level I suppose you could read this book as another serial-killer novel with a time-traveling gimmick as a hook, but to me it goes well beyond that sort of simplified explanation. Harper is figuratively plucking the wings off of women, killing them just as they are starting to make a difference in their present; he's also cutting off their potential for making a difference in the futures of others. Thinking about that, it seems to me that the author is not only talking about men who feel compelled to keep women down, but also about victims of violence -- where every life taken represents a loss of future possibilities. The crazy time loops in this novel help to point out that although time moves on, violence against women has always been, is, and always will be part of our existence, with effects that ripple ever outward over time.Overall, it's a good enough novel, one that kept me intrigued, but there were parts that dragged and I had to read it twice to figure out the House. I'm also not big on graphic violence, which there is plenty of in this book; I get the point -- these were living people with personalities, lives, parents, loved ones -- but sometimes too much is just too much. The ending, well, since I can't talk about that here, suffice it to say I think the action-packed empowerment statement was a little too obvious, but I know lots of people who'll disagree. This book is getting some excellent reviews, but not everyone is loving it -- I'm somewhere in the middle of all of that. I'll recommend it as a good summer read -- but read it slowly so you don't have to go through it a second time like I did.

Great descriptions, varied voices, and weave in the sci fi. True crime is the thread. True crime isn’t my thing so I found the descriptions more gruesome than I care for.

This book was a real page-turner at times, particularly in the sections entitled "Kirby" (our main character, and the girl who survived her attempted murder). I'm less enthusiastic with the "Harper" sections (Harper's the serial killer), especially when we got closer to the end of the book, at which point they just seemed like piling on, and a way to get more gruesome content into the book.But what really bothered me was the timeline of the story. It's all over the place, with Harper time traveling back and forth various days and years between the 1930s and 1990s. I don't know how many times I searched back to try to get context as to where we were in time. Thought about making notes, but this wasn't a school assignment, so I just shouldered on not worrying about the time. Perhaps I lost some subtleties, but the story wasn't worth the extra effort.

This is a really clever twist on the serial killer trope.In 1931 a man called Harper is on the run, he comes across an abandoned house, that once he breaks in appears to be in a better state than it should be. There is something about the house, it shows him the girls who will shine, and where through the next 80 years to find them, and kill them.Kirby is one of those girls, attacked in 1989, but she survives.Fast forward to 1993 and Kirby is working as an intern at a Chicago newspaper, supposedly on the sports desk but actually with the reporter who covered her attack. Given it's now a cold case, this is the easiest way to try and track down her attacker.Jumping backwards and forwards through time, we see the girls selected by Harper, or is it the house? A slice of their lives before it's cut short. You have the biologist, the Radium dancer, the Architect, even a transsexual. There isn't the level of gore you'd see from the like of Mo Hayder, but the deaths feel more important, as the girls are made real, even as you know they won't survive.The narrative jumps from time zone to time zone, and from the viewpoint of Harper to that of Kirby. She’s not the most sympathetic of characters, but Harper has no redeemable characteristics at all. It’s an interesting idea, and it’s very well written, flowing and taut.

I loved this book. If you're looking for a story you can just skim through because the plot is formulaic and the characters the same as any other thriller then you'll hate it! You need to take your time reading it, accept that the time line in the story isn't linear and hold your thoughts as most, but not all, of the threads come together as the book develops.It's not perfect, and you have to accept there's parts of the plot that don't get explained, but it's original and I enjoy books that make you have to think, absorb and piece together the story. There's too many formulaic crime books out there for the masses so nice to enjoy something different.

There are different ways to think about The Shining Girls. There’s a killer called Harper in the 1920s, and he stumbles on a house that manipulates him and sends him forward through time to murder girls throughout the twentieth century who seem to shine, because he always has and always will, and his connection to that house is more intimate than he could guess but also incredibly perplexing, and somewhere in the eighties there’s the girl who survives and starts to hunt him while fulfilling an internship at a newspaper, and…and…So yeah, you can think too hard about it, and miss the point. Or you can pay little attention too it, and wind up incredibly confused. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. The time travel works if you pay attention, but it’s ultimately just a garnish, seasoning a spectacular blend of murder and obsession that pays off in all sorts of ways. The period detail is engrossing, the characters - particularly Harper’s victims - are as rich as any supporting characters I’ve read, and the staggered chronology of the book is a clever, clever way to play with the pace and tension. Mostly, it’s a bloody good mystery, and while not all of the questions you have are going to be answered (Beukes is more interested in her characters than the weird hole in the universe that the house represents), it’s a marvellous ride.

Kirby Mazrachi survives a brutal attack and tries to hunt down her would-be murderer. Clues that it could be the work of a serial killer start to surface, except that the timelines of the other murders don't quite match up. Lauren Beukes reveals the reason and identity of the killer quite early on in this thriller, but that doesn't make this novel any less suspenseful as she leads the reader in Kirby's literal fight against time to apprehend the murderer as the events unfold in a non-sequential manner.Beukes's writing is graphic, and the gruesome scenes are spine-chilling, but she is a notch above the usual writers of the genre with her literary style. Of course, that she blends SF in so seamlessly with her realist storytellling edges her out of the field in a spectacular way. The alternating narratives that feature Kirby and her killer also flesh out the motivations behind each character and his/her respective back story. Here, Beukes seems to be relying on tried and tested traits, like the influence of missing or failed father figures, impoverished backgrounds, and the failure of intimacy, to explain (away) deviant behaviours.Nonetheless, the story grips you from start to finish and there is no let up. A riveting read.

A time travelling serial killer is an incredible premise for a crime mystery novel and one that Lauren Beukes achieves with skill. It took me several chapters to get to grips with the complex timelines and characters of this novel, but perseverance paid off and soon I couldn't stop reading. Kirby is a feisty heroine who you want to succeed in her quest to find the man who tried to kill her. As she tracks down a murderer she suspects she's trailing a serial killer ... but other clues she stumbles upon suggest something impossible is occurring.At times this is tough reading, so gruesome I had to close my eyes. Ultimately, it was the complex plotting and the fascinating character voices that hooked me. For me not all my questions were answered at the end of the book. That didn't detract from my enjoyment and it could be Beukes is planning more in this series ...