The Gilmore Guide to Books

Connecting Books and Readers One Review at a Time

  • Home
  • About Me
  • Reviews
    • Reviews by Author
    • Reviews by Title
    • Reviews by Genre
  • Podcast
  • Policies
    • Review Policy
    • Cookie Policy
    • Privacy Policy

The Shining Girls

June 3, 2013

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
Published by Mulholland Books
Publication date: June 4th 2013
three-stars

The Shining Girls

 

There was a lot of buzz at Book Expo America about Lauren Beukes’s new novel, The Shining Girls, and for good reason. The most often heard synopsis I heard was “Time Traveler’s Wife meets Silence of the Lambs”. If you’re squeamish that may be all you need to know but if you can handle a serial killer who disembowels his victims, Beukes creates a creepy but compelling character in Harper Curtis, a drifter who, in 1931, finds his way to a house in Chicago that when he exits it, takes him to another time. For Harper, this is the door to finding the women he calls the shining girls—young women he meets when they are still children or teens and whom he promises he will come back to see when they are older. They have no way of knowing that this intense, disquieting man will see them when they’re older for the sole purpose of extinguishing their brilliance.

He slits his eyes and tilts his face as if he is enjoying the sunshine so that it doesn’t seem he is examining the faces of all the girls who pass him. Glossy hair and bright eyes under heavy make-up and fluffy hairstyles. They wear their privilege like it’s something they pull on with their socks in the morning. It blunts them. 

It isn’t until 1974 that he meets Kirby, a six-year-old girl who may change his destiny. When he comes back to visit her in 1989, he makes the mistake of leaving her for dead but she survives, horribly wounded and mutilated and begins her life’s work to find him. This entails getting a newspaper job as an intern for the reporter who handled her story and convincing him to help her with her theory about additional Chicago murders by the same man. For Kirby, although she has physically recovered, she has found her old life to be gone and a new one difficult to start.

Along the way she misplaced her friends. The old ones didn’t know what to say. Whole relationships fell into the fissures of awkward silence. If the horror show of her injuries didn’t stun them into silence, she could always talk about the complications from the faecal matter that leaked into her intestinal cavity. 

The Shining Girls is a careful reading book. There are all the girls Harper craves—each with her own chapter, flashing back to their youth when they met and moving forward in another chapter to the year when Harper shows up to claim them. Beukes has done careful historical research and each of these young women imprints her unique personality, her shine, on the reader from a radium painted dancer who glows in the dark to a welder who works in the 1943 shipyards. Additionally, as the novel progresses it becomes less certain as to who (or what) is actually controlling events. Within the house there is a room with a wall covered in Harper’s handwriting and a talisman from each of the girls. It is these items that he leaves from one body to the next that connect them all but is the house directing him or has he created the house? It’s not a question that gets answered but as the plot builds and the fear rises it adds to the unnerving quality of this tangled story. Who will prevail?

Back at the House, it seems all of the objects are on fire in his head. He can still trace the trajectories, but for the first time he can see that the map leads nowhere. It folds in on itself. A loop he can’t escape. The only thing left to do is surrender. 

 

The Shining Girls may be purchased at:

Shop Indie Bookstores

three-stars

Related Posts

  • Related Posts
  • Same Genre
  • 3 Star Books
  • By Lauren Beukes
dark circles
Dark Circles: A Novel
October
October Reading-Wrap-Up
holdout
The Holdout: A Novel by Graham Moore
january
January Reading Wrap-up
All Things Cease to Appear
The Book of Speculation
Boene Season
The Bone Season
death
Death is Hard Work
Mrs. Houdini
deep
The Deep by Nick Cutter
sacrifice
The Sacrifice
emma
Emma in the Night
daughters
The Many Daughters of Afong Moy
mina
The Last Story of Mina Lee
The World We Found
The World We Found
broken monsters
Broken Monsters
july
July Reading Wrap-Up

3 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: Mulholland Books, mystery, suspense

Comments

  1. Shannon @ River City Reading says

    June 3, 2013 at 9:40 am

    I just got a copy of this and feel like I absolutely have to read it. I’m dying for a book that I can’t put down (it’s been a while) and I feel like this could be it. Maybe I just need some good creepiness right now!

    Reply
    • Catherine says

      June 4, 2013 at 9:19 am

      Shannon, it will definitely hold your attention but the time transitions are a bit hard. I had to keep going back and forth. Still, Kirby is a great character and it will fulfill your need for creepiness!

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  • Bloglovin
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter

Save time and subscribe via email

No time to keep checking for new reviews? Enter your email address to subscribe and receive notifications of new posts by email. No spam!

Bookshop

Currently Reading

Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle
by Emily Nagoski
The Dutch House
The Dutch House
by Ann Patchett
Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me
Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me
by Adrienne Brodeur

goodreads.com

Affiliate Disclosure

I’m an affiliate for Indiebound and Amazon. If you click on a link that takes you to any of these sites and make a purchase I’ll earn a small fee, which goes towards the costs of maintaining this site. Your support is appreciated. Thank you!

Archives

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

Theme Design By Studio Mommy · Copyright © 2023

Copyright © 2023 · Beyond Madison Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in