NPR On SHINING GIRLS
Library holds are growing on The Shining Girls, (Hachette/Mulholland) by Lauren Beukes after it was reviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered by Alan Cheuse on Friday, applauding it for its “heroine, the smart and spunky Kirby Mizrachi, [who] is as exciting to follow as any in recent genre fiction” and the “sharply described murder scenes — some of which read as much like starkly rendered battlefield deaths out of Homer as forensic reconstructions of terrible crimes.”
The novel is also moving up Amazon’s sales rankings, although it hasn’t cracked the Top 100 (it’s currently at #222).
The NYT‘s critic Janet Maslin declared it earlier to be ”a strong contender for the role of this summer’s universal beach read.” Movie rights have been acquired by Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, Appian Way.
Librarians responding to our Beach Read Challenge, were only partially won over. Joseph Jones of Cuyahoga P.L. says,
Short chapters and a fast pace makes this a definite beach read. The subject matter may turn off some readers who are not into serial killers, violence against women or just the casualness of the violence. Normally time travel is not an issue for me in books, but the way the author switches back and forth in time EVERY chapter does get a bit annoying. Having the date listed at the beginning of each chapter seemed to mock me more than help me figure out where the story was in the timeline. Also, when the author would try to throw in some cultural history for the different time periods I thought it had a tendency to drag the story down without really adding anything. The saving grace of the book though is Kirby. Broken, flawed and a survivor in every sense of the word, she burns with an intensity that for me defines “shining girl.”