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I fell in love with Porter’s writing when I read Grief Is the Thing With Feathers a few years ago, and was thrilled to love his second novel Lanny just as much if not more. I haven’t read The Death of Francis Bacon yet, though I’ve heard mixed things, but I was still really excited to read his latest book, Shy. I’m sad to say that I didn’t love it…I desperately wanted to but I didn’t. Porter’s style in the aforementioned works I’ve read felt so organic and natural to him - the language was lyrical and beautiful while at the same time being the antithesis of those things, and I found the way he played with form unique. Shy felt like a shadow of that. There were moments that definitely shone through, sentences that lit me up like his previous books did, but they were few and far between. Porter did an excellent job of getting into the noisy headspace of a lost and conflicted teenage boy but as a whole, I didn’t really like this book very much. It just didn’t work for me.