As a child of the '90s who spent her teen years at the mall, this book sounded like such a unique premise. And I really wanted it to work, but sadly it fell short of my expectations. The novel tries to cover too much, making it feel bogged down and slow at times. And the narration wasn't my favorite – much of it felt directed at a younger audience. I loved the setting and the characters, and would definitely try her sophomore novel if she writes one.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for providing an ALC for my honest review.

I've read some of the other reviews about Your Are Here, and I think many people are disconnected with life in a dying small town. There is drama and pettiness, hardship and miscommunication, and most of all, fear of the future.

Overall, I found You Are Here enjoyable, and look forward to any future novels written by Karin Lin-Greenberg.

Thank you to the publisher for the ALC. A heartwarming, beautiful, real feeling story that really found a place in my heart,

I thought this would be more about malls.

I’m kidding (kind of), but what I thought I was getting into here was a character study set against the backdrop of a failing mall. Instead, I mostly got petty drama and hokey life lessons unfolding amongst a cast of characters from the suburbs.

As an elder millennial I love a good “death of a mall” story, but the execution of that wasn’t successful here. The sense of place is mostly lacking, and the introduction of the murder came out of nowhere and didn’t fit with the tone or the rest of the plot.

Perhaps my biggest gripe with this one was that the writing style was deeply unappealing. The book is almost all dialogue and inner monologue, and ALL of it is written in a stilted and simplistic manner. It doesn’t come off as spare or (as I assume the author intended) as an indication that these are “regular people.” It just made everyone in the book seem dim.

Jackson gets the book’s few profound statements, and even those are presented in an overly infantilized tone for a nine year old. The audiobook format didn’t help with any of this, as the narrator’s vocalizations exaggerate all of the clunky, unsophisticated writing.

I listened to this for almost 2 hours and I don't mean this to sounds so harsh, but this one of the worst narrators I've ever listened to. I can count on one hand how many books I've actually stopped listening to because of the narrator and this is one of them. I'm sorry for not having a more thorough review. I think the premise sounds super unique and I'd still be interested in reading.

Thanks to #NetGalley for the chance to listen to this story. The narrator did a good job. I had a hard time getting into the story though. It just wasn’t for me, though it was well written and I’m sure some will love it!

Meet one of my favorite books of the year.

Karin Lin-Greenberg's book "You Are Here" is a little masterpiece, a book that explores interconnected relationships through the inhabitants of a small town and its fledgling mall. It is a serene book with deep insights, a refreshing salve that offers a wistful balm to the world. She never devolves into the saccharine but rather gives us a vibrant palette of lives, flawed characters reflecting on the mercurial essence of dreams, be they realized or unfulfilled.

Books like this can only be birthed out of an abiding empathy, a crystalline perception that we too often point a finger instead of lending a hand. But in the wrong writer's hands, this could telegraph as schmaltzy, didactic, or self-congratulating, a band-aid on the hole in the ozone. Lin-Greenberg is too talented to succumb to this. She understands we have a long way to go, but we can still move the needle.

I've read "chonky tomes" in the past, some centered on a single character, where I get to the end but feel I haven't stepped into the protagonists' shoes. So it takes a special kind of author to have a multifaceted tapestry, with each individual having less time in the spotlight, where I feel I know all of them so well by the time the curtain closes.

Perhaps a quiet rendering of small-town life is my kryptonite (and if you loved anything my friend Ethan Joella has written, pick this up now). But this beacon of hope will stay with me for a very long time. The world needs, and needs to know about, novels like this.

I can't wait to read more by Lin-Greenberg in the future! Absolutely loved this one!

Solid 3.5. I was on the fence about this until about 40% in. Then you see how all of this beautiful story comes together. It is a slow burn on the front side, and you feel like you walk in, in the middle of a conversation.

The narrator was the perfect choice. If you are looking for a feel good read, that gives you lots of feels check this one out.

I enjoyed this book and particularly loved the narration. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance reader audiobook copy.

Honestly speaking, the book cover caught my attention but when I saw the audiobook was narrated by Jennifer Aquino I JUMPED on this. I’ve followed her for a while and was psyched to listen to her read.

All that said, not only did she deliver but so did the novel itself! I didn’t read the blurb and didn’t know what I was in for but what an appropriate novel for our times. I don’t think there’s a single non flawed character, true to life. Everyone was complex, intriguing and beneath it all is a surprise twist I did not see coming. I fell for each character fast and felt like I was reading a neighborhood I could be living in. Various cultures, ages, family lives on display here.

Beautifully written and narrated!

You are here, in an America where the driving economic engine and social-type phenomenon called a “shopping mall” is clearly dying. All you have to do is look at the vacant storefronts in even the largest and seemingly busiest malls around you. Or at the vast acreage of sparsely populated parking lots that surround them.

There are lots of stories about what happens in small towns when the largest employer in the area leaves or dies. Stories about the economic depression and eventual death of the town it once supported.

But what happens when a shopping mall dies? (We’re probably in the process of finding out in real life, as they do seem to be dying all over.) Greenways Mall in upstate New York has been dying for years at the point where this book picks up its action.

Or rather, the lack thereof, which is the problem in a nutshell. There is very little going on at the mall. It’s dying and everyone knows it. It’s been dying for years, to the point where its actual demise won’t be much of a blip in the local economy. Not many stores are still open, not very many people still work there, not many people, even in the neighborhood, still shop there. It’s a vicious circle, cycling rapidly towards the drain.

But the lack of traffic in the mall, writ large, does not mean that the place isn’t the hub of several people’s lives and/or their economic mainstay. They are the central figures in You Are Here, Tina Huang who is the last stylist at Sunshine Clips and her little boy Jackson who spends his after school hours doing his homework at the salon. Kevin, the manager of the chain bookstore outlet, is killing time in a dead end job because he can’t make up his mind about what he really wants to be doing with his life. And all too aware that his wife is running out of patience with his lack of pretty much everything except crazy business ideas that will only eat up money they don’t have.

Then there’s Ro Goodson, an elderly widow who comes to the mall because she’s lonely. She’s Tina’s only regular customer, and she’s a fixture at Greenways. A disapproving one who bestows judgemental advice on everyone she meets, making it clear that none of them are measuring up to whatever standards have ossified inside her barely polite and unconsciously bigoted head.

The mall and its denizens all seem accepting of their fate, trapped in a cycle where nothing good ever seems to happen, until something truly terrible occurs to shake them out of their respective sloughs of despond. It may be the making of each of them. Or it may mow them under.

Time will, as it always does, tell.

Escape Rating B-: The premise of this book has a tremendous amount of potential. Shopping malls, once a bright fixture of the landscape, are dying pretty much everywhere. So there are lots of Greenways Malls out there and probably one near where you live just as there is here. So this sounded like it would have lots of story potential. Which it does.

The question for the reader is whether or not the book in hand lived up to that potential. As you might surmise from the rating, I ended up with very mixed feelings.

One of the parts that is done very well is that each of the individual characters, from 9-year-old Jackson Huang to 89-year-old Ro Goodson, is distinct and distinctly well portrayed. We get to know who these people are and how and why they’ve ended up in this crumbling place – and just how much of their lives will crumble with it.

But not a lot happens in You Are Here. It’s a slice-of-life kind of story, where every character is shuffling along in their rut – except for 9-year-old Jackson – and can’t see over the edges of the rut they’ve worn down for themselves.

Even the big event that knocks everything off course is downplayed as it happens very late in the book. The chapter with the most verve is actually an epilogue, where we learn the effects of that event nearly a decade later.

The story as it goes along is a story of quiet desperation told in plots and subplots that knit together well but don’t seem to go much of anywhere until that sharp break almost at the end.

And that was pretty much where this story fell down for me on not one but two fronts. As I said above, the characters are distinct and well-drawn, which should have made this a great book for audio. But it wasn’t, which was pretty jarring after the marvelous performance of The Wager earlier this week.

In the case of You Are Here the narrator is very precise but her reading is flat. She doesn’t voice the characters enough to make each one as distinct as they are in the text. I had to drop the audio and switch to text very early in the story just to keep going with this one, as my reading group recommended it and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

The other reason this didn’t work for me as well as it did for others in that group is that it is VERY much in the literary fiction tradition, which means that not much really happens but the characters angst about it a lot. If that’s your jam this will work for you, but if it’s not, it likely won’t.

Which is too bad, because this slow build of a novel confronts a whole lot of serious issues in 21st century life, and does a great job of making the reader feel those issues through those well-drawn, distinct, characters. For this reader, that made You Are Here an interesting but not compelling book.

Thank you to HighBridge Audio, NetGalley and Karin Lin-Greenberg for an advanced audio copy of this book, in return for an honest review. I adored just about everything about this book, the cover is beautiful, the narrator was wonderful and the characters that I had the pleasure of meeting and loving had me thoroughly enjoying listening to this book.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Greenways Mall is finally closing for good, and herein we meet its last inhabitants.

This is definitely a somber and heavier read that has themes of discrimination, poverty and financial instability, complicated family dynamic, and community. Each character we meet is well-developed and many of the stories are interconnected. The first part of the book was very well-paced, but it did feel the second half became a little messy trying to tie all the loose ends of the stories back to the closing mall.

I think this read has a lot of deeper things to consider and reflect on as we see malls across America empty one by one, and I appreciate that Lin-Greenberg really painted a face onto this scenario and brought it fresh life.

I listened to this one via audio and really enjoyed, definitely would recommend to others.

The absolutely gorgeous cover drew me in but unfortunately that’s where the engagement with this novel ended. I listened to this painfully slow character-driven novel and I’m sorry to say that it was nearly impossible to listen to this narrator voice this novel. For one thing, the narrator has a high, sing-song voice and when combined with the author’s excessive descriptions (I.e. “she picked up her Diet Coke with her right hand and took two sips from the blue and white striped straw before placing it gently on the white counter and stepping two paces to the side”) the whole effect came across as patronizing. The narrator’s voices didn’t gel with me either; for example, the nine year old boy sounded more like a four or five year old. I think this narrator would be perfect for a children’s book because she over annunciates (great for kid listeners) and her voice sounds a bit like a TV preschool teacher.

I don’t know whether I would have enjoyed this a bit more if I had just read it instead of listened to it but I doubt it because it is just too slow and unnecessarily descriptive. Not for me.

Thank you to HighBridge Audio and NetGalley for the advance audiobook. All opinions in this review are my own.

This audiobook was honestly wonderful. This was such a beautiful and unique story, and I highly recommend it to people who love this genre.

First of all, can we gush about this cover? I’m not gonna lie, I requested You Are Here by Karin Lin-Greenberg based solely on the cover. I hit the request button without even reading the synopsis! Ha! I don’t do that very often, but I just couldn’t resist.

Once my approval came through, I did actually read the synopsis, and was pleasantly surprised because it sounded like my kind of book! A large cast of characters, each with their own individual storyline, yet they all intertwine at some point or another by the end of the book. In this case, a local mall is about to close it’s doors, and the reader learns how this closure will impact a group of neighbors who either work there, or just frequent the mall regularly.

Even though there’s multiple characters, and everyone has a lot going on, the novel didn’t move too terribly fast for me, and it felt highly character driven. (Which I love.) It was perfectly paced, had little action-packed moments thrown in to keep me on my toes, and still gave me plenty of time to connect with each character. You Are Here is kinda quirky, a little random, super charming, and very unique.

This novel involves intertwining many stories. It was fabulous. I loved seeing the connections and getting to know the characters. What an amazing community.

In a failing mall there are a multitude of people who work, visit and collide lives with each other.

We get to know a teenage girl aiming for stardom and dealing with a stalker, a little boy obsessed with magic and afraid to share his interests with his mom, a man stuck in limbo and not sure how to move forward, an old woman who depends on the mall for social interaction and struggles to say the right thing, and a mom who feels like it might be too late to chase her dreams.

Their lives weave in and around each other, occasionally tangling before a tragedy and the mall's closure spurs major life changes.

I always love these stories where we get to meet and know so many and the way their lives intertwine.

What a wonderful and heartwarming read.

I loved the characters in this story and how they were all connected because they worked in the mall. Also, how you were able to learn about their backgrounds and their family.

They all share a tragedy that occurred at that mall which affected each of them different. Makes them rethink life and where they are at and where they want to be in the future.

In they end you get to find out what the future brought them and how they are doing. Reconnecting with one another.

Overall, I really enjoyed this read. It was different from what I normally read which made it refreshing.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I really loved this one! The story, told from multiple POVs flowed so well and I felt invested in all the characters. The narration was beautiful and clear. Thank you so much to HighBridge Audio for the ALC of this one.