The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

A few months ago, we read The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden by Jonas Jonasson. It wasn’t the worst we’ve read but it was weird and silly. When we’d made our selections for the coming year, we hadn’t realized that we’d picked another book by the same author. Since we weren’t thrilled with Sweden, we decided to switch to an alternate from our list of leftover books. The book was The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes. What a great murder mystery/time travel story, in a twisted creepy way!

Here’s the synopsis:

CHICAGO, 1931. The powers of a magical house allow a psychotic serial killer, Harper Curtis, to jump around the 20th century, stalk young girls, and eventually kill them. The victim’s names are written on the bedroom wall, already chosen and singled out for death. The girls and women, the “shining girls,” are each from a different decade between 1930 and 1990. They are all strong individuals with potential who work hard trying to improve their lives. At the urging of the House, Harper inserts himself into the lives of the shining girls, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. He is the ultimate hunter, vanishing into another time after each murder, untraceable until one of his victims survives. CHICAGO, 1992. Kirby is the last shining girl, one of the bright young women whose lives Harper is destined to kill. Amazingly, she survives the brutal attack and begins searching for her would-be killer with the help of ex-homicide reporter Dan Velasquez, who covered her case for the newspaper. Soon Kirby begins unraveling the mystery of the other girls who didn't make it and closes in on the impossible truth.

There have been so many books written lately in the psychological thriller genre featuring the word “girl” in the tile: the original one, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and her multiple sequels, Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, The Good Girl, The Girls, Luckiest Girl Alive, All the Missing Girls, etc, etc… You get the idea. But The Shining Girls has to be one of the most unique, chilling and disturbing ones in its class. And I loved it! Don’t get me wrong. It’s a hard book to read, with the psychotic killer bouncing around in time, the violence, the mysterious house. Most importantly, be warned – the killings are horrific, described in graphic detail, so this book is not for the faint of heart. All of this just makes it more gripping.

Following is an assortment of thoughts, musings, questions, opinions, and objections from a variety of sources and commentators, including me.

Gender Issues

According to Beukes, she wanted to keep the focus on the female victims to examine what real violence is and what is does to women. The women are sharp and bright and ready to set the world alight in some small way and push through the fear. The killer goes for women “with a fire in their guts;” he’s not into physical characteristics but some inner quality that shined out of the girls. The story is more abut their lives than their deaths. She wanted this book to highlight the violence done to women whose deaths go unnoticed.

The focus of The Shining Girls is on extremely graphic, bloody, gendered violence. Harper is only killing women and more than that, he is killing women who “shine” and who are “burning with potential. ” As Kirby researches what clues she can find, we are allowed a glimpse into Harper’s victims' lives and know that they would truly have been extraordinary.

• What does the idea of “potential” mean exactly and why use it as a departure point and premise?

It becomes clear that only a few special women have this so-called potential, to the point where the killer has to find these few women through time. Further, some of the girls no longer shine and this constitutes a problem for Harper. For example, one of the women he is supposed to kill doesn’t “shine” because she is a drug addict who has lost interest in life.

• Is there a judgment being made here that some girls are more special that others?
• If so, what makes them special?
• If a girl does not “shine, ” does this imply the idea of squandered” potential?

The House

The author hints that the House is a physical manifestation of Harper’s messed-up id/ego. He has already proven that he is psychopathic killer before he knows anything about the House. But the idea that the House is representative of Harper’s id doesn’t really make sense, given that it is the House commanding him to track down and murder strangers whose existence he could never have been aware of in his own time.

• What is this evil, bloodthirsty House and why does it care about killing a bunch of girls?
• Why these particular girls?
• If it’s an external presence, what exactly does it have against these women?
• Does the House really have nothing better to do than lure in homicidal bums so it can persuade them to kill young women?
• Why is there no sign of an opposing force for good, like a candy cottage that travels through time helping victims?

     Shining Girls
For some of the women, it’s easy to see how their talents might change history: scientists (Mysha), architects (Willie), and a trail-blazing African-American Rosie the Riveter (Zora). We never learn exactly what the victims might have achieved that the House wants to prevent. What about the burned-out failed artist (Rachel, Kirby’s mom), the burlesque dancer and stripper (Alice Templeton), and the boozy, amoral aspiring criminal (Etta Kappel)?

Time Travel

Lauren's friends explain time travel

The house that allowed Harper to travel back and forth through time needed to be explained a bit more. Readers are expected to believe that there's something mystical going on, a strange presence of sorts. It would have been helpful if we’d been given a little information about how the House worked and how it facilitated time travel.

• Are there other Houses that act as time-travel portals?
• Why is the House only willing to transport Harper within a certain period of time (1929-1993) and only in Chicago?
• Wouldn’t anyone with the ability or power to time travel would try to visit their own past or future selves if they could? 

Harper not only doesn’t try but apparently doesn’t consider it a possibility. Nevertheless, he instantly grasps a basic premise of time-travel physics: whatever he experiences in the present, it’s his responsibility to travel back in time and set up that situation in order to close the loop. For example, when he discovers the House’s kill room, filled with all of the mementos taken from the victims, he immediately understands that it’s his task to go back in the past and commit the killings for his present self to see. This triggers the infinite-regression paradox of where the kill-room idea (and the selection of those victims) originally came from.

• How is something already there in the House when it didn't happen yet?
• How can the artifacts taken from the shining girls be on their bodies and in the House at the same time?
• Each girl’s name is in Harper's handwriting on the walls of the House. How could he not know that he’d been there before?
• Did the House come together all at once or was it pieced together over time as Harper found each of his Shining Girls?

The Ending

(SPOILER ALERT) The last chapter is a final confrontation between Kirby and Harper. She breaks into Harper’s time travelling house to finally confront her attempted murderer then sets the house on fire, destroying Harper’s chances of killing others in the future. Kirby shoots Harper five times and allows him to slowly die.

• We don’t get the satisfaction of knowing that the mystery is solved or that Harper will never hurt anyone again.
• Will Harper in fact go on hurting people until the end of time, with loops of time and space endlessly repeating the same story?

(SPOILER ALERT) The fate of Kirby’s friend and boss Dan ending is also left ambiguous. He was taken back to 1929 and mortally wounded by Harper who leaves him to die in the snow. Dan somehow mustered the strength to reenter the House and help Kirby. Dan and Kirby’s story ends with the pair exiting the house in the correct time period and apparently riding off together into a happy sunset.

This was a really creative story and very absorbing to read but the ending felt rushed and almost anti-climatic, like the author had a page limit. It leaves us feeling strangely unsatisfied because there are too many questions that remain unanswered.

• We never get an explanation as to what Harper’s or the House’s motivation was to kill the shining girls.
• Although we're given a lot of back-story about Bartek and the moneybag and even a short glimpse of who Harper was in his younger years, we never learn how or why the House came to be.
• The mementos that Harper left behind at each crime scene were very distinctive. Over a span of 70 years, shouldn’t at least one of the homicide detectives noticed how unusual some of them were? None of them seemed to think they meant anything significant.  
• Did all of the killings remain unsolved until Kirby started her own investigation?
• By going back through newspaper articles and police evidence, Kirby discovers anomalies about the artifacts left behind at the crime scenes. She determines that some of them hadn’t even been made in existence when they were found on the bodies of some of Harper’s victims.
• After Harper discovers that Kirby survived, why doesn’t he just turn around and go back to through the door to the few moments before he encountered Kirby in the park? He would know what to expect from her and would be able to kill her right away?
• If Bartek reopened the door in 1929, will the House regenerate itself even though Kirby burned it to the ground in 1933?
• Is Kirby now capable of crossing through time?

Some Final Objections

Of course, there’s the inevitable flirting and burgeoning relationship that develops between Kirby and Dan, which was a gross given how much older he is than her. It’s great that he helps her research the mysterious deaths and that he’s there for her in the end, trying to save her from Harper. But did we really need them to hook up together? Couldn’t they just have been friends, or mentor and student? If we really needed the relationship to turn into an intimate one, why didn’t the author make Dan younger so that it wasn’t so tacky? Given that a woman wrote this book, couldn’t she have avoided the older man/younger woman cliché?

Also, the jumping around in time gets quite confusing. Keeping all of the victims straight as Harper travels back and forth through the decades was challenging, especially because he visits them as children and adults. It helps that the chapter titles note the year and names but that wasn’t quite enough to keep everything straight. It got even more complicated with all of the mementos being taken from and left behind on the victims so I created a spreadsheet with as much information as I could gather. I hope it helps other readers.

Name	Last Name	Description	1st Encounter	Yr Killed	Age	Memento Left	Memento Taken
Glow Girl	Jeanette Klara	Exotic dancer	1931 (p. 72)	1931 (p.78)		xxx	Butterfly wings
Jin Sook	Au	Social worker	1988 (p. 62)	1993 (p. 275)	24	Butterfly wings	Baseball card
Zora	Jordan	Factory worker	1932 (p. 88)	1943 (p.107)	28	Baseball card	Metal Z
Willie	Rose	Architect (Lesbian)	1950 (p. 123)	1954 (p.139)			Vintage lighter
Kirby	Mazrachi	News intern	1974 (p. 5)	1989 (attacked) (p. 157)	21	Vintage lighter	Tennis ball
Margot		Abortion aid	1968 (p. 249)	1972 (p.249)	25	Tennis ball	Cassette tape
Julia	Madrigal	College student		1984 (p. 41)	21	Cassette tape	Pill packet
Catherine	Peck	Drug addict	1985 (p. 272	1993 (p. 288)	27	--	--
Alice Templeton	Lucas Ziegenfeus	Phone sales girl (Transsexual)	1940 (p. 218)	1951 (p. 297) Suicide	27	Pill packet	--
Mysha	Pathan	Biologist	1987 (p. 310)	1993 (p. 314)	~17	Protest button (from Margot)	--

Other Unexplained Things

• takes plastic pony from Jin Sook in 1988 (gives it to Kirby in 1974)
• takes Pigasus political protest button from Margot in 1968 (gives it back to her in 1972)
• takes pink bunny barrette from Catherine in 1985 (gives it back to her in 1993)
• takes lab ID badge from Mysha in 1987 and charm bracelet from Etta, the nurse, in 1932

Things found in times periods before they existed:

• Plastic pony from Hasbro given to Kirby in 1974 but it was made in made in 1982
• Jackie Robinson baseball card found on Zora Jordan in 1943 but Jackie signed with Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947
• Pill packet found on Alice in 1951 but packet were not available until 1972

It looks like The Shining Girls is being made into a movie. Check out this website to see more about the book, the author, and the (upcoming?) movie: http://theshininggirls.com