“The girl who wouldn’t die hunts the killer who shouldn’t exist”

Note: This is the first of the ten (ten!) books that were finished while abroad or while adjusting from returning from abroad. The other reviews will be along shortly and will be mostly retrospective, so apologies for any gaps in my memory.

First up….

Harper Curtis is down on his luck in 1931 Chicago when he discovers the House. Through the House, Harper is able to find and to follow what he calls “shining girls” – young women in different time periods who stand out to him. The shining is never explicitly explained, but as each girl is introduced, it is clear that she is somehow brilliant or full of potential, including a Rosie the Riveter, an architect in the 1950s, a transgender woman, an artist, a scientist, a social worker, and so on. Harper is driven by the House to kill each of these women before disappearing again into another time, but he finds himself hunted when a girl named Kirby unexpectedly survives in 1989.

The reader is treated to both the perspectives of Kirby and Harper. In Kirby’s storyline, she deals with the aftermath of surviving a brutal attack and becomes obsessed with finding the killer. She partners with Dan, a former crime reporter converted to the sports section, in order to chase down the serial killer she is convinced exists.

Beukes deals with the classic time travel conundrums by simply not explaining any of it, just that unquestionably time travel exists through the House. I’m mostly fine with the lack of timey-wimey, except that it does leave some questions (how did the House start? are there other Houses?) and the non-explanation gives the feeling that time travel is just a convenient plot element to make a serial killer thriller more interesting by spanning 70 years out of order. In each new time period, there is also a certain amount of exposition and details to let you know how carefully the author researched each particular era; the combined effect on me was that the book was maybe one genre too many.

I might compare this to Gillian Flynn’s work but only loosely. It has elements of the same twisted mystery and gruesome murder, and Kirby reminds me of Libby Day, the jaded protagonist of Flynn’s Dark Places who also survived a murder attempt. However, The Shining Girls lacked the same underlying tension and suspense until the last twenty pages; mostly because, due to both time travel and the dual perspectives of Harper and Kirby, the reader already has most of the information laid out, it’s just a question of how the events are going to happen.