I love my library! They are truly awesome at getting in new books to read, without a long wait or huge price tag. I received my copy of this to read last week and it took me a little while to read, due to the fact that I didn’t want to have nightmares so I didn’t read this book at night.
Saying that I was both compelled to read and yet forced to stop at turns during the reading of this book. I thought it was a brilliantly written novel, yet, novel, I have to ask how much of it really is a novel, this story is seeped in reality. What I found most disturbing about the book is that to me, it is a reflection on the world at the moment. A reflection on how our lives are online, how we are often afraid to speak, how work can dominate our lives and how there is such a breakdown of community that social media is the norm. How people become more broken, how utterly convinced of their own dream that nothing stands in the way of it.
I loved how Beukes weaves a tale of artists dreaming and how it is catching and that doors can open, and it seems to me that she captures this day and age perfectly in her book. So, what is it about? A serial killer in detroit who is an artist who is broken and where the dream inside his head takes over the human part of him and infects others who can ‘see’. It is about the relationship between a Police detective mother and her teenage daughter. It is the story of an online ‘self made’ journalist. A disturbing and rather dark novel set in the here and now, it captures the essence of our times.
Read it, I don’t think you will be disappointed.
To see my review on The Shining Girls go here and for those of you who have read her other books, do they all contain serial killers? Or is it just her last two that do?? And I am sure that even after I have pressed publish on this post, this book will still sit with me and percolate inside my brain….
I thoroughly enjoyed this book too. Zoo City and Moxyland don’t have serial killers really, they’re more urban South African fiction, VERY different to The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters, but I adored them too!