The Shining Girls, Lauren Beukes

"The girl who wouldn’t die – hunting a killer who shouldn’t exist.

In Depression-era Chicago, Harper Curtis finds a key to a house that opens on to other times. But it comes at a cost. He has to kill the shining girls: bright young women, burning with potential. He stalks them through their lives across different eras, leaving anachronistic clues on their bodies, until, in 1989, one of his victims, Kirby Mazrachi, survives and turns the hunt around."

A bizarre little beauty of a book, this time travel serial killer murder mystery who-dunnit, is, as that description suggests, a mish-mash of all sorts of genres that shouldn't really work but do.

The story itself is lithely written, racing along at a solid pace. Both the heroine, Kirby, and the villain, Harper, are terrifically written, with neither given the treatment of flawlessness; Harper is a monster, but also a victim of circumstance, petty, vindictive, cruel and murderous, but also weighed down upon by the House, and his own half-created destiny. Kirby is broken, but rarely sympathetic, she's shattered into cold edges, and like Gone Girl this a story of flawed human beings who often exert little in the way of humanity.

Trotting between eras, the real skill of The Shining Girls is in picking out victims that do pull at the herat strings; Harper's task, to kill off women with something exceptional about them is horrifyingly, cruelly misogynistic and utterly readable. In choosing such an obviously 'good' group to target Beukes removes the need to make them 'good' people; their lives are testament to that, and so Kirby's own flaws mean very little compared to what she could have been. Her survival is in a world that she is out of place in, her achievements after are through a prism of her broken nature.

Really enjoyable book. Perfect thriller.

Also Try:
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Travelers Wife
Robert Harris, Silence of the Lambs
Dean Koontz, From The Corner of His Eye

Prime Minister Portillo and other things that never happened, various

"What if Lenin's train had crashed on the way to the Finland Station? Lee Harvey Oswald had missed? Lord Halifax had become Prime Minister in 1940 instead of Churchill? In this diverting and thought-provoking book of counter-factuals a collection of distinguished commentators consider how things might have been."









I find these non-fiction 'What if?' books slightly sad, as they work as neither a truly good history book, or as a work of historical fiction. This is compounded by a mixed bag of authors, who range from those catalogueing slight alterations to full blown changes in the timeline, in a variety of styles, with varying degrees of success.

One of the big issues is that very few of these imagine a world changed all that much by the alterations they describe; most are obscure, or at least historically distant, enough that it's hard to see how a revitalised party or individual could have impacted more. Even greater changes, like JFK surviving or Churchill being passed over for Halifax engender only slight fluctuations - legislation passes slower, or the pace of the war moves differently, with the same fixed outcome.

It's a very Fukuyama-esque book, where the outcome we currently have is seemingly all that's possible. Compare and contrast to real works of speculative history, such as Harry Turtledove, and the difference is huge.

Often dry, sometimes interesting, but only fitfully worth dipping into, this is a book more for the writers than the readers, and is best passed over in favour of better offerings.

Also Try;

Robert Harris, Fatherland

Eric Flint; 1631

Harry Turtledove, Guns of the South

Military Blunders, Saul David

"Retelling the most spectacular cock-ups in military history, this graphic account has a great deal to say about the psychology of military incompetence and the reasons even the most well-oiled military machines inflict disaster upon themselves. Beginning in AD9 with the massacre of Varus and his legions in the Black Forest all the way up to present day conflict in Afghanistan, it analyses why things go wrong on the battlefield and who is to blame."





Jalyss got me this book for Christmas and I finally devoured it before the wedding.

It's exactly what it says on the tin; a look at military blunders. Divided into various chapters focussing on different modes of blunder, from incompetent leaders, to poor planning and intelligence to disastrous excecution.

Some of the stories are tragic, most farcically stupid. Incompetence tends to be a key theme. Many of the same people appear again and again. Churchill appears more often than one might expect.

There's a definite bias towards English disasters, with a very obvious historical bias towards the period of 1850 to 1920 (i.e, Victorian and World War One English military disasters) which is a slight let down, as these are fairly similar in scope and mostly rely on the fact that the Imperial generals underestimated anyone who wasn't white or British.

Still, entertaining, and I learnt some interesting stuff in it, especially the chapter on the American civil war.

Also Try:
Amazon has bout 30 books called Military Blunders, try one of those!