Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

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Well, I got nothing honestly. This was not a very good book. The premise was cool (serial killer that can time travel) and all of that, but the execution of said premise didn’t work out and I found myself not liking Kirby (the final girl as horror fans like to say). The other women/girls who were murdered were not given a lot to do but die. Also, there was way too many things that were left open-ended, i.e. why is this man able to do […]

I liked this a lot better than the series

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

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This one chased me for a while, then went on special right before the the tv series came out. I liked it a lot (and had consequential high hopes for the series that were not realised in the pilot.  Our readings of the novel may differ, but I never noticed time flickering and changing small things in the way it did in the pilot, and was not happy with the change).  The protagonist is Kirby, the girl who got away, hideously injured (and the dog […]

A book I did not expect to hate.

Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes

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I think I mostly hated this? Yeah. I did. And I don’t really know why. I liked but didn’t love The Shining Girls when I read it a couple of years ago. I assumed I would similarly like not love this. And it does sound creepy and intriguing. A boy turns up dead in Detroit, his top half attached to the dead body of a deer. There are multiple narrators, including a detective on the case, a teenager, a journalist, and a homeless man. But […]

Beukes is breaking her readers again

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I’ve read several Lauren Beukes books over the last few years and I’ve loved each of them. This is definitely the darkest I’ve read of hers. Maybe also one of the darkest books I’ve ever read to be honest. I thought it was going to be more on the mystery side of genre fiction, but it turns out it was really more on the horror side. The thing about Beukes is that no matter what she’s writing about, it’s going to be good because she […]

I’m here for the sloth sidekick

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It wasn’t until after I had finished Zoo City that I realized the author is the same Lauren Beukes who wrote The Shining Girls which is a book I really enjoyed last year. The tonal range between these two novels is huge, so I’m really excited to read more of Beukes’ work. Technically they’re both fantasy, but The Shining Girls is horror mostly rooted in reality except for one piece of magic anchoring the entire tale, whereas Zoo City is infused with magic and a […]

Shine on you crazy diamond

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I don’t usually read books this dark with so much violence. Not that I’m against it, it’s just not my thing. Still, I ended up enjoying The Shining Girls. Lauren Beukes is certainly a talented writer and she did a great job in writing a complicated story that was still cohesive and made sense. The Shining Girls is a bit of a genre mashup. It’s a time travel tale, but it also is very much thriller/horror too. Although there are lots of characters, the story […]



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