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.

#Review - Near the Bone by Christina Henry

Design by Julia Lloyd

Near the Bone

Christina Henry

Titan Books, 13 April 2021

Available as: HB, 363pp, audio, e

Source: Advance e-copy via Netgalley

ISBN(HB): 9781789095951

I'm grateful to Titan Books for an advance e-copy of Near the Bone via NetGalley to consider for review.

Near the Bone is an exciting and absorbing, if at times harrowing, read.  Above all it's a MEGA page turner - if you pick this one up, you'd best clear your diary for a few hours because you won't want to put it down again until the last page.

We first meet Mattie, out in the woods where she lives with her husband William on a remote mountain in the US, on an errand. Mattie discovers something new and strange. Mattie debates what to do. Should she stop and investigate, at risk of making herself late? Or should she hurry on? We soon see that her dilemma is framed entirely in terms of what William would want her to do.

She's terrified of getting it wrong.

And she will get it wrong. Because William is a manipulative abuser who has Mattie at his mercy. ('She wasn't going to think of how strange it was, because William told her what to think and she was sure he wouldn't like her thinking on this'). 

I won't give much more detail on that, because it would be spoilery. Henry reveals the detail of what has happened to Mattie slowly, layer by layer, building up a picture and showing us Mattie's unenviable life, every detail calculated to keep her under William's sway: starved, beaten, denied any warmth or humanity ('That's why William was always starving you, always working you when you were exhausted. Without food and sleep you couldn't think, couldn't fight him...') Much of her own history is lost to her, and it is only revealed as we learn about it, over a harrowing and desperate period of two or three days which turns her life inside out. 

I also do not want to be too specific because there are some really dark themes here - themes of abuse and control - which may be triggering for some. For me, it was a mark of how good Henry is at spinning a story that even in the darkest moments I wasn't tempted to put this book aside. I had to know what would happen. It helps that, alongside the tense drama between Mattie and William, there is another strand here - that discovery of Mattie's leads to glimpses of something strange and deadly in the woods. Something that has been killing the local game. Something with uncanny grace and strength, and a greater than animal cunning. 

William becomes obsessed with this thing, whatever it is, seeing it almost as a supernatural test of him. That might have given Mattie some respite except that is short-lived as other complications come into her narrow world. And the one things she has learned in her life with William is that complications are trouble, and trouble is HER FAULT.

This story was creepily, scarily believable, William a true monster but one who seems, increasingly, familiar, his attitudes those of men that we all know about, his sense of entitlement and dominance recognisable from tragedies that happen aria and gain. The comparison of man and monster is explicit: William in the cabin is bad, the beast outside apparently worse, and Mattie is trapped between the two of them. For other writers that dilemma might seem overdone, but Henry's writing gets under the skin of both Mattie and William so well that it just seems, well, true.

This is both a cracking good read and a real exploration of human darkness. Not a dark fairytale, despite the overtones of big-bad-monster-in-the-wood, but much more uncomfortable, closer to home and raising urgent questions.

Finally, they say never judge a book by its cover but... that cover! 

For more information about Near the Bone, see the Titan website here.