I wanted to love this novel – I loved the idea of a defiant final girl and a time-traveling killer, especially because it seemed it would do a bang-up job of transcending genre, but unfortunately this fell flat for me. Though the writing was often sharp and wonderful, I felt like I wanted more explanation about the killer and his motives rather than that the killer was just someone who happened upon a house that lets him time travel, and unfortunately the lack of it left me feeling unsatisfied in the end.

DNF

I can see why this title was so popular, as it's clearly going to be eerie and likely unputdownable with the right sort of reader. It is not a good fit for me though. In the early chapters, I've already been disgusted and offended innumerable times. There is no way I personally would enjoy reading this.

While I adored Zoo City and its odd and brutal take on the urban fantasy, The Shining Girls ended up being a bit crunchy for my tastes, though still an excellent novel. The time traveling serial killer plot is a stroke of genius, and fairly savagely sticks a fork in the cheap Freudian psychology that tends to inform serial killer narratives. The killer kills because women need killing, over and over throughout history, but most especially the shining ones, those who cannot quite conform to their gender's expectations. Kirby's irritation with her status as "survivor" is a nice touch as well, the way mere survival is lauded in women when thriving is what will cut them down. Nicely done.

Harper, the anti-hero of Lauren Beukes’s terrific novel The Shining Girls, is a killer. He chooses his victims when they are just girls, giving them something special – a toy, something that glitters, a hair decoration — and speaking with them as if he is a friend, even introducing himself. Sometimes he finds it hard to control his violence during these visits, thinking about how easily he could kill them then and there, as well as the nauseating details of how he would do it. Then, when the girls are in their twenties or a bit younger, Harper returns to them and dispatches them, making a clean escape every time. He leaves behind a souvenir, an artifact from another victim. And he is nearly impossible to catch.

The reason he is able to visit his victims as children, find them again as adults, and elude capture, is that he has a time portal. He happens upon it accidentally in 1931, when he breaks into a boarded-up and condemned house in Chicago. He kills the occupant of the house and discovers its odd properties. More, he finds the proper dress and currency for other times. And he finds the room in which the history of the shining girls of the title — the girls he will kill — has been documented in his own handwriting. We never learn the origins of this room or this house, or how the time portal works, but we don’t really need that information. What we need to know is that Harper is a psychopath who has just stumbled onto a means to commit serial murder that is just about perfect.

One of Harper’s victims is Kirby. But he messed up with her; she survived, her toughness serving her well. In 1992, she’s a college student who is interning with the Chicago Sun-Times, using her position with the newspaper to investigate her own attempted murder. She is assigned to Dan Velasquez at her request. Dan is a sports reporter, which ought to make it hard to get access to information about murders, but Dan used to be a homicide reporter and Kirby has done her homework. Right up front she makes it clear that she doesn’t care how the Cubs are doing, or even know the first thing about baseball. She’s only asked for Dan because there were no internships with homicide reporters available. Dan covered her attempted murder, and he becomes intrigued with her search for her would-be murderer — and with her.

The Shining Girls seesaws from Kirby’s viewpoint to Harper’s and back again, and throws in a few more viewpoints from time to time. Beukes is careful to keep us oriented by heading each chapter with the name of the viewpoint character and the date, so that the reader is never left scratching her head to try to figure out where and when she is (a flaw of many novels about time travel). The characterization is sharp, especially as to Kirby; she is not the standard loveable heroine of many tales, but a young woman who is determined to get what she wants and not particularly concerned about what she needs to do to get it. I enjoyed her strength and determination, even as her hardness became more apparent.

But the real star of this book is the meticulous plotting. We follow Harper as he hops around in time, committing a murder now and a murder then, leaving clues that make no real sense to the police. Better, we follow Kirby as she unravels the Gordian knot of these crimes, making connections that make no temporal sense (how can the police explain a Jackie Robinson baseball card left at a murder scene years before Robinson was in the major leagues?), but following the clues where they lead her, no matter how impossible the solution might seem. Beukes dances us through this complicated scenario with seeming ease; I spotted no missteps that might trip up either a thriller reader or a science fiction reader.

The Shining Girls is an exciting blending and mashing of genres. I expect that science fiction, fantasy and horror readers are more likely to be satisfied with this book that thriller readers, as there is no mystery about who the bad guy is and no real suspense about what the climax of the book will be. The joy here is in watching it all unfold, in seeing how the clues link up and lead Kirby to an impossible solution. And it’s a considerable joy; The Shining Girls was one of the best books of 2013.

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.

An incredibly visceral thriller. https://ladybusiness.dreamwidth.org/2013/05/20/the-shining-girls-by-lauren-beukes.html

Electronic ARC provided by NetGalley.

The Shining Girls is a rather straightforward thriller (as straightforward as anything involving time travel can be), about a time traveling serial killer and the one victim that got away. The perspective in the book is mostly divided between the killer, Harper, and his victim, Kirby, with various other characters--including other murder victims--picking up the narrative for a chapter here and there. I found the story compelling, and I enjoyed Kirby as a main character. Beukes does a great job of showing that while Kirby has survived her attack as well as can be expected, she is certainly a bit damaged. Her actions throughout the novel are frequently impulsive and lacking in maturity, while remaining mostly sympathetic. Kirby feels like a real, though young and inexperienced, girl.

I found the writing creepy and compelling, and loved the atmospheric bits of 20th century history that were inserted every few chapters. The Shining Girls is a decently quick read. The writing is solid, characters are well drawn even if they only appear in a single chapter, and the story is compelling enough to carry the reader through to the end.