Sweetness pervades these early scenes in which Ms. Lin-Greenberg gently exposes a child’s optimism, a parent’s exhaustion and the tenderness that cushions each fresh disappointment. But there are also welcome hints of sharpness. The moribund mall is conjured up in wonderfully banal detail ... Compassion and wry understatement remain [Lin-Greenberg's] strengths, and in You Are Here she captures not only the frayed texture of suburban existence but also the turbulent emotions, immediate and long buried, of protagonists who are ultimately far more than stereotypes.
Masterful and understated ... Lin-Greenberg beautifully translates the lives of an ordinary group of people into an extraordinary, even triumphant novel.
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.
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.
