The Shining Girls - bookwyrm.cincodenada.com

Paperback

Published Aug. 29, 2013 by Harper.

ISBN:: 978-0-00-746458-6

(1 review)

"A time-traveling serial killer is impossible to trace-- until one of his victims survives. 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. He 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 an ex-homicide reporter who is falling for her, Kirby has to unravel an impossible mystery"--Publisher's web site.

9 editions

Kadomi@buecher.pnpde.social reviewed The shining girls by Lauren Beukes

Time-traveling serial murder

5 stars

Content warning Spoilers for the plot

I personally loved this story to bits, even though the ending was a bit too vague for me. But other than that, I pretty much inhaled this book.

Curtis Harper is a grifter in the early 1930s. But then he finds this strange house in Chicago, and a wall of names, of girls that shine, and their mementos. The house allows Harper to travel through time, and he leaves a bloody slash through time, as he murders shining girls throughout all periods of time up to the 90s. But one girl survives, and starts to hunt him down.

I would have liked to know more about the house, what allowed the antagonist to travel through time like this? But that's not the point of this novel. Instead we get fascinating glimpses through time, of the victims. Of a woman of colour working in the arms industry during WWII. A dancing girl in the 30s who painted her skin with radium. Of an illegal abortion helper in the 70.

I was very hooked, despite the unsatisfying end of the story, in the same way Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell usually reel me in. Must hunt for her other books now.