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 listeni...

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...

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 ...

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.

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 w...

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 ...

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 d...

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 t...

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 ...

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 aboutbut this one is different. the time travel is...