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The Shining Girls
Author:
Beukes, Lauren
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Class:
Fiction
Age: Adult
Language: English
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LC: PR9369.4
Print Run: 75000
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ISBN-13: 9780316216852
LCCN: 2013003018
Imprint: Mulholland Books
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
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Pub Date: 06/04/2013
Availability: Out of Stock Indefinitely
List: $26.00
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Hardcover
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Physical Description:
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375 pages ; 25 cm
H 9.5",
W 6.5",
D 1.25",
1.34 lbs.
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LC Series:
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Brodart Sources:
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Brodart's Insight Catalog: Adult
Brodart's TOP Adult Titles
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Bibliographies:
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Los Angeles Times Bestsellers List
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Awards:
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Starred Reviews:
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TIPS Subjects:
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Historical Fiction
Fantasy
Science Fiction
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BISAC Subjects: |
FICTION / Thrillers / Suspense
FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Historical
FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Women Sleuths
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LC Subjects:
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Serial murderers, Fiction
Suspense fiction
Time travel, Fiction
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SEARS Subjects: |
Adventure fiction
Serial killers, Fiction
Time travel, Fiction
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Reading Programs: |
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| Annotations |
| Brodart's TOP Adult Titles | 02/01/2013 |
| The key to time travel hinges on killing 'the shining girls.' A serial killer who must keep killing girls with special skills to keep jumping through time slaughters his way through the ages, unstoppable until an intended victim lives to tell her tale. 384pp., 75K, Auth res: Cape Town, South Africa, Tour |
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| Journal Reviews |
| BookPage | 10/15/2013 |
| Get your running gear on--in The Shining Girls, you'll be taken on a breathtaking, loopy trip through time. South African novelist Lauren Beukes, who penned the award-winning sci-fi/fantasy Zoo City, returns with The Shining Girls, a creepy, supernatural thriller set in Chicago, where a dilapidated House (yes, capital "H") containing a mysterious portal sends the book's villain back and forth through time. Throughout the 20th century, he dispatches a series of women in brutal fashion, removing a small item from one victim here, depositing it with another there, then materializing back at the House to review his exploits. A former victim seeks justice against a time-traveling serial killer in Lauren Beukes' new novel. Kirby Mazrachi has survived horrific wounds as the only victim to escape--barely--one of Harper's attacks, and she's obsessed with tracking him down. She knows there's something wacky about how he operates; impossibly, she remembers that he first visited her when she was 6 years old. An intern at the Chicago Sun-Times, Kirby has lots of archived news records at her disposal, and for help there's Dan, the sports editor who's falling in love with her. Otherwise, there doesn't seem much to recommend this hunt, as Harper appears to hold all the cards. Beukes, a talented writer, is blessed with a graceful yet spot-on prose style, often bordering on the sublime, and she knows how to tap into the tics and crooked depths of her main characters, especially a plenty-screwed-up Kirby and her druggy mom, Rachel, who are described with startling insight. And of course there's the character of the House, which, depending on the year you enter it, runs from seductively inviting to a mangled wreck. For any who hold a key, however, it yields a doorway that conquers time. Harper is another matter. Even though we have his evil grins and private murderous satisfactions at our disposal, it's hard to get much of a look at what drives him. He's drawn to a select group of women who "shine" for him in some way--with potential or just plain life--and he's driven to dispose of them violently. Beyond that, we mainly witness his cruel, frenetic journeys. Whipping back and forth in time gets a trifle confusing and is sometimes a letdown. Chapters skip jarringly among the years and characters, giving us little opportunity to absorb where we are. How much better this author's talent would shine if she were to send us a more lasting, intelligent thrill. Barbara Clark. BookPageXTRA Online Review. BOOKPAGE, c2013. |
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| Booklist | 04/01/2013 |
| Harper Curtis isn't your run-of-the-mill serial killer. He gets to time travel from the 1920s through the 1980s, killing girls in different decades, all to satisfy a bloodthirsty Chicago bungalow. Yes, you read that correctly: the house makes him do it. In this genre-bending novel, Beukes never explains the origins of this evil house or how it manages to transport Harper from year to year. All we know is that Harper is compelled to track down and murder specific "shining girls" in gruesome ways (usually evisceration), and he gets away with it since he can escape across time. Until he leaves Kirby Mazrachi behind in 1989, that is. Kirby miraculously recovers from the vicious attack and is determined to track down her assailant, even if the police consider it a closed case. She enlists the help of Dan, a reporter at the Sun-Times, and they slowly uncover odd clues left behind in a dozen unsolved murder cases; it turns out Harper has been leaving behind items from the future. Not for all tastes, but fans of urban fantasy may be interested in this clever and detailed supernatural thriller. Vnuk, Rebecca. 368p. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2013. |
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| Kirkus Reviews | 03/01/2013 |
| Beukes carries her experimentation in science fiction (Moxyland, 2010) and fantasy (Zoo City, 2010) to very dark corners as she follows a time-traveling serial killer who preys on young Chicago women from the 1930s until the 1990s. In 1974, a little girl named Kirby takes a toy pony from a strange man in his 30s named Harper. In 1931, Harper, a tramp no older or younger than in 1974, hears and follows mysterious music to a boarded-up tenement and opens the front door with a key he has found in the pocket of a coat he stole earlier that night. Inside the house, which is elegantly furnished, is a man's dead body. On the bedroom wall are the names of girls possessing a special glow that he must extinguish (and his first victim is a young showgirl with a literal glow about her from the radium she uses in her act). Each time Harper leaves his house, he can travel in time. He marks his victims first by giving them small gifts, then returns years later to kill them. And he returns again and again to 1931. Because of his ability to travel in and out of the 60-year time frame, he avoids suspicion. But there are glitches. In 1951, the transgendered showgirl he met in 1940 kills herself before he can kill her. In 1993, an artist turned crack addict has already lost her shine by the time he strikes. And Kirby, whom Harper assumes he has killed in 1989, has managed to survive. By 1993, when Harper's pace has sped up, Kirby is a student intern for attractive, middle-aged newspaper reporter Dan, who covered the story of her attack. Tracking her assailant, Kirby begins to suspect the bizarre nature of Harper's vicious killing spree. Despite thrillingly beautiful sentences, Beukes' considerable imaginative powers seem wasted in this shallow, often ugly game of cat and mouse tarted up with supernatural elements that do not bear too much scrutiny. 368pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2013. |
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| Library Journal | 06/01/2013 |
| Harper Curtis is down on his luck, a drifter in Depression-era Chicago with a predilection for violence. When he finds a key to a special house that allows him to travel through time, he uses the house (or it uses him) to hunt down and kill certain special girls, his Shining Girls. Kirby Mazrachi is identified as a Shining Girl, but she survives Harper's brutal attack and starts hunting him. VERDICT The gripping mix of sf, horror, and suspense works because of the way the likable characters Kirby and her newspaperman ally contend with the menacing chill of Harper and his special house. (LJ 4/1/13). Ala-Rusa Codes. 384p. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2013. |
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| Library Journal Prepub Alert | 12/17/2012 |
| Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Award, South African Beukes has a creepy premise here: Harper Curtis discovers a key to a house opening on other eras, but to keep it he must kill "the shining girls"-girls whose gifts set them apart. And so he stalks them through time, until one victim survives and comes after him. Atta girl. 368p. LJ Prepub Alert Online Review. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2012. |
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| Publishers Weekly | 04/01/2013 |
| South African author Beukes, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Zoo City, adds an intriguing wrinkle to the serial killer suspense novel. In the creepy opening chapter, set in 1974, sadist Harper Curtis, who's on the prowl for one of his "shining girls" ("bright young women burning with potential"), approaches six-year-old Kirby Mazrachi, as she plays alone. After an initially friendly exchange turns nasty, Harper promises that he will see Kirby when she's grown up. In 1989, he keeps that promise by savagely attacking her. Miraculously, Mazrachi survives and leverages an internship with a Chicago newspaper into a private investigation of her assailant who can travel through time. The shifting perspectives require readers to stay alert, but those who do will be rewarded. Beukes is particularly good at garnering sympathy for Harper's female victims, creating deep characterizations in only a few pages, so that they come across as more than just fodder for a psychopath's mission. 5-city author tour. (June). 368p. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2013. |
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9780316216852,dl.it[0].title
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