Shy
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1.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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 the question 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This explosive, experimental novel doesn’t just describe the plight of a troubled teen—it puts you in his head. Shy is a British boy who’s gone through and gotten into every kind of trouble you can name. He’s consumed by a whirlwind of intense, uncontrollable emotions—fear, anger, lust, violence, embarrassment—and he’s fighting for a foothold in life at Last Chance, an educational alternative for teenagers in crisis. His struggle to connect with his teachers, family, and schoolmates is the story’s core. But it’s like no other novel we’ve encountered. Author Max Porter makes us understand Shy by experiencing his thought process from the inside out, using fragmented language and a stream-of-consciousness flow in place of traditional narrative structure. Before it’s over, we’ve been psychologically buffeted about nearly as much as Shy. But we’ve gotten a greater understanding of human nature in the bargain. Narrator Joe Gaminara does an epic job of embodying the drastically different voices echoing in Shy’s mind. This might not be where you’d want to live, but it’s an unforgettable place to visit.
