Review - Shy Girl by Mia Ballard

Shy Girl

Mia Ballard
Hachette, 6 November 2025
Available as: PB, 352pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(PB): 9781035437924

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Shy Girl to consider for review.

"Shy Girl" actually contains three stories. The first, and longest, is about a woman called that - "Shy Girl" - and the abuse she suffers. The others, which are thematically similar, don't feature her, although one is a prologue of sorts. All three though are covered by the author's warning as to how disturbing the themes of the book are, which I would take seriously.

Illustrating that, "Shy Girl" is not the main character's given name - that is Gia - nor one she adopts for herself. It's the name given by her abuser, and renaming her is far from the worst thing he does to her.

The story is told fairly straightforwardly in three parts. In the first, Gia describes her awkward life, her difficult mother and how everything seems to just have gone... askew? Off course? Gia seems to be motivated by a desire for certainty, for safety, for exactness, perhaps to balance a deficiency, a lack of love and nurture. But this only takes her so far. One day, her exactness deserts her and she can't do her job any more, so poverty soon sets in. But there are deeper roots to her problems than the loss of her job. "I've been depressed" Gia states "for longer than I've been unemployed". All the same, economic trumps emotional well-being. To pay the rent, Gia tales to a sugar-dating website which leads her to Nathan.

This opens Gia into the power of her abuser. The second act of the book is very dark, basically a story of control and coercion, enforced by violence and threats of violence. I'm deliberately avoiding detail here both because of spoilers and in order not to repeat potentially triggering ideas. The story is though - I think - a compelling account of how one man dominates and abuses a woman. Ballard shows Gia's transformation into Shy Girl gradually. At every step, you think, it must end here. Surely not...? But it does not end and the reader is manoeuvred into a sort of complicity with Nathan - the final depths of whose manipulation doesn't actually become clear till almost the end, when he shows how he will have the final word, that even if Gia finds a way to tell her story, it'll be his version that is believed. In some ways that's the most chilling moment in the book, setting up Gia's final transformation - and revenge.

To mention that revenge isn't, I  think, a spoiler - if you follow the link to the publisher's site below you'll see the book described as a "harrowing tale of survival and revenge" - and it is visceral, but it depends on the transformation, the drift, that has befallen Gia. I didn't quite know what to make of it. In some respects it was only the prospect of this that made reading the earlier parts of the book bearable. But equally, what happens is fantastical - the restoration of a kind of wild justice not one that will redress the inequalities and power structures of the real world.

An absorbing and thought provoking read and one of the creepiest stories I've come across lately.

"Shy Girl" itself is joined by that sort-of prequel, "Before", and by a third story, "Harold", which takes a different take on the fantastical to show a woman dominated in the private domestic sphere by a male narrative such that the inertia and mysogny of the outside world will side with him, not her. It ends less happily than Shy Girl, though perhaps "happy" isn't the word I should use here. I think both stories in the end are about the power of the ability to frame the narrative and where denial of that power can lead.

For more information about Shy Girl, see the publisher's website here.