The Shining Girls: A Novel
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Not sure about how I feel about this one. Can't decide if I just have to accept the supernatural element and that's why there was no explanation, or if I really want some, and an epilogue.
Goodreads asks me "What did you think?" and I am really not sure how to answer that with this book. I read it because I loved the AppleTV mini series adapted from it and thought it was both creepy as hell and ultimately empowering. But I did not enjoy the book nearly as much. However, I can't say I hated it, either. There is a lot of really interesting research that went into Beukes writing this book. I am extremely impressed with all of that - all the back stories of the women that Harper is hunting, for instance, and tying it into Chicago history. These were the things that kept me engaged - and I liked the characters of Kirby and Dan, cared enough for them and their well-being facing off against a homicidal killer for those final 50 pages or so that I was bracing myself through to the end.
But man...the things I hated were huge and the biggest one was the inclusion of a certain kind of dialect whenever a black person was narrating. It read like "this how white women imagine black men speaking" and it was deeply cringey. The two chapters with Mal narrating - which honestly didn't even feel necessary in the first place, he never seemed like an important character - are especially grating in this way. With all the people listed in Lauren Beukes' Acknowledgements pages, you would think at least one of them could have acted as a sensitivity editor and gently explained that this was just...not okay.
Also, half the book was Harper's story and he wasn't really all that compelling. He seemed rather unstable even before he found the house and started killing the women, but as we follow him from time to time, to woman to woman, the story just drags. A chunk of the book's middle felt like a slog to get through because of this, and also, the overwhelming amount of women and their backstories felt like just a lot of meandering and trying to include interesting facts. Some of it was interesting but I really felt like it could have been cut in half.
Finally, I am usually pretty good at suspending my disbelief around time travel but somehow, the house as time travel vehicle worked in the mini-series much better than it did in the book. Overall, I feel like this was one of the rare cases when the adaptation was actually better than the book itself.
But man...the things I hated were huge and the biggest one was the inclusion of a certain kind of dialect whenever a black person was narrating. It read like "this how white women imagine black men speaking" and it was deeply cringey. The two chapters with Mal narrating - which honestly didn't even feel necessary in the first place, he never seemed like an important character - are especially grating in this way. With all the people listed in Lauren Beukes' Acknowledgements pages, you would think at least one of them could have acted as a sensitivity editor and gently explained that this was just...not okay.
Also, half the book was Harper's story and he wasn't really all that compelling. He seemed rather unstable even before he found the house and started killing the women, but as we follow him from time to time, to woman to woman, the story just drags. A chunk of the book's middle felt like a slog to get through because of this, and also, the overwhelming amount of women and their backstories felt like just a lot of meandering and trying to include interesting facts. Some of it was interesting but I really felt like it could have been cut in half.
Finally, I am usually pretty good at suspending my disbelief around time travel but somehow, the house as time travel vehicle worked in the mini-series much better than it did in the book. Overall, I feel like this was one of the rare cases when the adaptation was actually better than the book itself.
I had heard good things about this book, so I really wanted to like it, but I just didn't. The writing was passable, but Harlan's motives for hunting the Shining Girls were sort of nebulous, and there wasn't a lot of explanation about why they "shined" or why he felt the need to hunt them other than that he was obviously mentally ill. The book's grasp of nonlinear time and the idea of time paradoxes was non-existent and all of Harlan's motives seemed to be fueled by the idea that he needed to do the things he did because he knew had already done them. On top of not really grasping the complexities of the effects of time travel in a book that was solely about time travel, the story was wholly predictable and involved enough detailed descriptions of animal cruelty that I almost put it down without finishing it several times.
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