You Are Here

December 1, 2022

Chinese American author Lin-Greenberg uses the closing of a small-town mall in upstate New York as the locus of multiple stories. While the lone hair stylist at Sunshine Clips watches instructional YouTube videos on the sly, her son's high school friend, a magician's assistant and cashier at the mall, counters unwanted attention from an oddball boy. She shares that secret only with the mall's loner bookstore manager. From a short-fiction champ: Faulty Predictions won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and Vanished won the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize.

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March 15, 2023
This debut novel offers a group portrait of people in upstate New York trying to figure out how to build new lives. Every day after school, Jackson Huang joins his mom, Tina, at Sunshine Clips in Greenways Mall. She tends to the needs of a dwindling roster of clients. He does his homework and sweeps up hair. Her most loyal customer is Ro Goodson, an elderly woman with a prickly personality and a knack for being offensive. Ro's next-door neighbor Kevin manages the bookstore across from the salon. He's been stalled on his dissertation long enough to realize that he doesn't really want to be in academia. He lives with his wife and two kids in a tiny house he built in his mother-in-law's backyard. Maria, who works at the fried-chicken place in the food court, is a high school senior who dreams of being an actor. Losing the lead role in West Side Story to a girl who is blond and blue-eyed makes her question herself. Their lives intersect in a variety of ways, and all of them are wondering what they'll do when the mall closes. A dying shopping center seems like a perfect metaphor for...something, but what that something might be never quite coalesces. Instead, the mall feels like a set built for this very small cast. The scenes set in Ro and Kevin's neighborhood and in Maria's school also seem like they're happening on a soundstage. Perhaps the intention here was to invoke the claustrophobia of a small town, to create the sense that the outside world isn't real. But nothing that happens within this circumscribed environment feels real, either--not even the act of violence that serves as something of a climax. Lin-Greenberg earned critical recognition for Faulty Predictions (2014) and Vanished (2022), her collections of short fiction. But the invention and energy readers found in those stories are missing here. A disappointing novel from a much-praised writer.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 15, 2023
Lin-Greenberg's masterful and understated debut novel is an engrossing, character-driven story that will delight fans of Liane Moriarty and Celeste Ng. The story unfolds in a mall that is on the brink of closing. Readers meet a hairdresser with unfulfilled dreams, her precocious yet shy son, a kind and driven teenage girl working in the food court, a bookstore manager in a slump, and a seemingly grumpy elderly woman. These divergent characters don't appear to share any connections, but their lives are intertwined in unexpected ways that are slowly revealed as the story progresses. As the mall quite literally decays around them, they must grapple with what the future holds while also dealing with the effects of a tragic event in their community. At its heart, this is a story about our ties to and interactions with others and how our communities impact our actions, influence our aspirations, and shape our identities. Lin-Greenberg beautifully translates the lives of an ordinary group of people into an extraordinary, even triumphant novel. You Are Here is sure to be a book club favorite.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from March 6, 2023
Lin-Greenberg’s exceptional debut novel (after the collection Vanished) explores a complex web of relationships at a fading mall in Albany, N.Y. Among the people drawn together by the mall are Tina Huang, the last remaining stylist at a struggling hair salon, and Ro Goodson, an 89-year-old white woman who is Tina’s only regular customer, and who Tina believes comes in because she’s lonely. Ro takes a dim view of her Black neighbor Joan for moving into Ro’s predominantly white neighborhood years earlier. Ro also doesn’t think much of Joan’s daughter, Gwen, an adjunct professor, or Gwen’s white husband, Kevin, manager of the mall’s bookstore, both of whom live in a tiny house on Joan’s property. Maria, a high school senior who hopes to become a professional actor, dons a chicken outfit for her food court job and is upset when she doesn’t get a lead part in her school’s production of West Side Story. The other characters are past worrying their dreams won’t come true; Tina secretly yearns to be an illustrator of children’s books but “knows it’s not a practical thing to pursue,” while Ro plants a lemon tree that she knows won’t bear fruit until after she’s gone. After establishing a quirky tone, the novel’s third act reaches a grand scale as an active shooter prowls the mall, though the real drama rests in the characters’ reckoning with the limits of what is possible. This is a remarkable study of ordinary people’s extraordinary inner lives. Agent: Kathy Schneider, Jane Rotrosen Agency.