A time traveling serial killer, you say?????
I was so ready to amp it up to 1.21 gigawatts and press the accelerator to 88 MPH. But then . . . .
It’s like the author was really late for a meeting with the publishers, is running down the hallway as fast as possible and drops the whole shebang – chapters scatter and there is no time to put everything back together in the proper order, so she makes the decision to go with whatever arrangement they are in once she picked them back up and Chapter 34 becomes Chapter 1, Chapter 8 becomes Chapter 2, etc.
If you didn’t catch my drift with the analogy above, basically The Shining Girls is kind of a mess. The premise sounded great and the first scene in the book grabbed my attention since it reminded me of one of my favorite serial killers
but sadly, the delivery of the remainder failed to keep it.
There was no reasoning behind Harper Curtis being a time traveling killer (A HOUSE telling you that you should become a serial killer is not a good enough answer) – hell there wasn’t much reasoning behind Harper Curtis being a killer at all. Talk about the most one-dimensional bad guy of all time.
Kirby (the final “Shining Girl”) and Dan (her boss/mentor/friend/whatever) were the saving grace that kept me reading. Delete the time travel b.s./Kirby’s personal attachment to the killer and turn the duo into a couple of overzealous reporters trying to link various murders together in order to prove a serial killer is on the loose and this one could have been a winner.
2.5 Stars, but I’m giving it a bonus ½ Star for Dan being a sports reporter and the tons of references to the Sandberg/Sosa/Grace era of the Chicago Cubs. You can take the girl out of Illinois, but you can’t take the Illinois out of the girl ; )
I was so ready to amp it up to 1.21 gigawatts and press the accelerator to 88 MPH. But then . . . .
It’s like the author was really late for a meeting with the publishers, is running down the hallway as fast as possible and drops the whole shebang – chapters scatter and there is no time to put everything back together in the proper order, so she makes the decision to go with whatever arrangement they are in once she picked them back up and Chapter 34 becomes Chapter 1, Chapter 8 becomes Chapter 2, etc.
If you didn’t catch my drift with the analogy above, basically The Shining Girls is kind of a mess. The premise sounded great and the first scene in the book grabbed my attention since it reminded me of one of my favorite serial killers
but sadly, the delivery of the remainder failed to keep it.
There was no reasoning behind Harper Curtis being a time traveling killer (A HOUSE telling you that you should become a serial killer is not a good enough answer) – hell there wasn’t much reasoning behind Harper Curtis being a killer at all. Talk about the most one-dimensional bad guy of all time.
Kirby (the final “Shining Girl”) and Dan (her boss/mentor/friend/whatever) were the saving grace that kept me reading. Delete the time travel b.s./Kirby’s personal attachment to the killer and turn the duo into a couple of overzealous reporters trying to link various murders together in order to prove a serial killer is on the loose and this one could have been a winner.
2.5 Stars, but I’m giving it a bonus ½ Star for Dan being a sports reporter and the tons of references to the Sandberg/Sosa/Grace era of the Chicago Cubs. You can take the girl out of Illinois, but you can’t take the Illinois out of the girl ; )
No comments:
Post a Comment