Sep 9

Sep 9 Shy

Author: Max Porter
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

A novel about guilt, rage, imagination, and boyhood, about being lost in the dark and learning you’re not alone

This is the story of a few strange hours in the life of a troubled teenage boy.

You mustn’t do that to yourself Shy. You mustn’t hurt yourself like that.

He is wandering into the night listening to the voices in his head: his teachers, his parents, the people he has hurt and the people who are trying to love him.

Got your special meds, nutcase?

He is escaping Last Chance, a home for “very disturbed young men,” and walking into the haunted space between his night terrors, his past, and the heavy question of his future.

The night is huge and it hurts.

In Shy, Max Porter extends the excavation of boyhood that began with Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and continued with Lanny. But here he asks: How does mischievous wonder and anarchic energy curdle into something more disturbing and violent? Shy is a bravura, lyric, music-besotted performance by one of the great writers of his generation.

TL;DR Review

Shy is a tiny book that packs a gigantic punch like only Max Porter can. Dark but emotionally poignant, this book will break your heart in the best way. I loved it.

For you if: You like when a book experiments with voice and interiority through typography.

Full Review

Whew, y’all. I need to read Grief Is the Thing With Feathers ASAP because Max Porter really just does it for me. I read Lanny back when it was longlisted for the Booker and it instantly became an all-time favorite, so I was very excited to read Shy. This one was darker and heavier, but just as emotionally poignant and distinctive.

When we first meet Shy, a teen who lives at a school for troubled young men, he’s sneaking out in the middle of the night with a backpack full of rocks. The main narration takes place over the course of only a few hours, but we spend a lot of time flashing back through his past — the voices, the violence, his struggle with impulse control and relationships with others.

There’s nobody who can put you inside a character’s head like Max Porter. His use of creative typography (for example, a character yelling at Shy might be depicted by giant text running across both pages of the open book), mastery of voice, and trust in the reader to keep up as he barrels forward combines perfectly every time. For this reason, I implore you: Always listen to AND read Max Porter’s work! Listen as you read along. Trust me, do not skip the audio or print editions!!! (Also, it’s so short. Only 2:16/136 pages!)

This book broke my heart in the best way that books can. Shy has a lot of trauma and struggle. He’s tunneling deep into the core of who he is and whether he can feel hopeful again. Porter shows us how impossible it is to know the core of someone, and that we are all individuals whose struggles are unique even when patterns emerge in behavior. He reminds us how easy it is to forget all that simply by making Shy himself so vivid.

Do it do it do it. Read this one.