
Awesome Shape Puzzles 123
Games and Education
App
- Let learning become your children's favourite pastime with this fun shape puzzle game that doubles...

LEGO® Life
Entertainment
App
A safe community built specially for boys and girls, LEGO® Life is 100% free to download and 100%...

My Dictionary Pro
Education and Entertainment
App
Do you want to learn a foreign language quickly? A unique program for memorizing words will help you...

Nutrients - Nutrition Facts
Food & Drink and Health & Fitness
App
Nutrients (previously called Foodle) is nutrition at your fingertips! How much sugar is in an apple?...

3rd Grade Non-Fiction Reading Comprehension
Education and Games
App
Improve your reading skills! 3rd Grade Non-Fiction Reading Comprehension is the most advanced...

GPS Recorder X
Navigation and Lifestyle
App
The “GPS Recorder X” is a recorder capable of operating in all kinds of measuring environments...

Hustle Sports Training Drills
Sports and Health & Fitness
App
Hustle offers basketball instruction from expert coaches and trainers. Whether you're looking for...

SatFinder - Adjust your dish in few seconds
Utilities and Productivity
App
SatFinder – Adjust satellite antennas in 4 easy steps – The original since 2010 With SatFinder,...

Handy Photo
Photo & Video and Entertainment
App
***** “What does it do? Everything… quickly and easily. It’s really awesome!“ – Life In...

Jamie (131 KP) rated The Shining Girls in Books
Jun 4, 2017
The story is a heavily character driven dive through recent American history, from the Great Depression in the 1930’s all the way up to the early 1990’s. I was impressed by the amount of research that was put into this book, each decade having enough detail to get a good feel for the era. Many of the characters were pretty well fleshed out for such short chapters, and I found myself liking many of them.
My favorite part of the story, though, was the tragedy that was Harper because of how very flawed and human he is. He views himself as commanding, charming, persuasive, but to many of his victims he’s just downright creepy. He thinks himself calculating yet he makes mistakes left and right. He has a drive to rise up from the trenches of poverty and starvation from his own era, to be powerful. His choice of victims are all women in a great act of femicide, because he has this dire need to feel masculine. He chooses women that he views as invincible, that shine with ambition in order to assert his dominance by snuffing them out. He thinks he has this divine purpose, a destiny to fulfill because he wants it so desperately, even though the reality is that it’s simply senseless violence with no real meaning. He obsesses over the murders, returning to the scene of the crimes over and over to get off. Harper is pathetic. It was a refreshing change from the stereotypical smooth, genius archetype that glorifies killers. I didn’t know right away that this book was meant to be a feminist novel, but that’s what I took away from not only Harper’s struggle with masculinity, but with the strong and fiercely independent female characters all throughout the book.
There were a couple of problems with the book, however, that I feel need to be addressed. The mash up of genres is both a good and bad aspect of the story. The middle chapters where romance comes into play to me was really distracting and feels out of place. The tagline describing the novel also states that “the girl who wouldn’t die hunts the killer who shouldn’t exist” but honestly, it didn’t feel much like Kirby was really hunting the killer. Looking for connections with other murder cases and investigating some wild hunches, yes, but really she spends most of the book developing her bond with Dan. I would have really liked for this to be more of a cat and mouse type of hunt between Kirby and Harper.
The chapters with Harper were much more interesting, but even those became a little repetitive. We as the reader follow Harper as he stalks his victims in childhood, waiting for the right time to strike when they reach adulthood. While it was necessary for the plot to detail the characters to both connect them to the greater chain of paradoxes and to show Harper’s descent, the violence is excessive and extremely detailed, and after a while it started to feel more like torture porn. It just got tiring after a while.
Despite its flaws, I thought this book was good, and I mean really good. I loved the way that the time paradoxes were handled, time travel stories tend to be tricky and usually end up with a couple of glaring loop holes. The loops are handled in a way that I found satisfying and this book is easily my favorite time travel novel I’ve ever read. It is truly unique and a story I won’t soon forget.