You Are Here
by Karin Lin-Greenberg
GENRE: Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction
The only hair stylist at Sunshine Clips secretly watches YouTube primers on how to draw and paint, just as her awkward young son covertly studies new illusions for his magic act. His friend and magician’s assistant, a high school cashier in the food court, has attracted the unwanted attention of a strange boy at school. She tells no one except the mall’s chain bookstore manager, a failed academic living in the tiny house he built in his mother-in-law's backyard. His family is watched over by the judgmental old woman next door, whose weekly trips to Sunshine Clips hide a complicated and emotional history and will spark the moment when everything changes for them all.
Exploring how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are inextricably bound to the places we call home, You Are Here is a keenly perceptive and deeply humane portrait of a community in transition, ultimately illuminating the magical connections that can bloom from the ordinary wonder of our everyday lives.
Author Biography
Karin Lin-Greenberg's first story collection, Faulty Predictions, won the 2013 Flannery O'Connor Award in Short Fiction from the University of Georgia Press and won gold in the Short Story category of Foreword Reviews' INDIE Book of the Year in 2014. Her second story collection, Vanished, won the 2021 Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Fiction and was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2022. Her debut novel, You Are Here, was published by Counterpoint Press in May 2023. Her stories have appeared in literary journals including The Antioch Review, Boulevard, Colorado Review, New England Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Story, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and she was a finalist for the Chicago Tribune's 2018 Nelson Algren Award. Her story “Housekeeping” received a Pushcart Prize and was listed as a Distinguished Story of 2020 in Best American Short Stories 2021. She has been awarded fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Wesleyan Writers Conference, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Longleaf Writers Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and MacDowell. She has taught creative writing at Missouri State University, the College of Wooster, and Appalachian State University. Currently, she lives in upstate New York and is an associate professor in the English Department at Siena College. She also teaches in Carlow University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program. - Author's website
Kirkus
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 (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Publisher's Weekly
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. (May)
Last Night at the Lobster
by Stewart O'Nan
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Mariel Prager needs a break. Her husband Ned is having an identity crisis, her spunky, beloved restaurant is bleeding money by the day, and her mother Florence is stubbornly refusing to leave the church where she’s been holed up for more than a week. The Lakeside Supper Club has been in her family for decades, and while Mariel’s grandmother embraced the business, seeing it as a saving grace, Florence never took to it. When Mariel inherited the restaurant, skipping Florence, it created a rift between mother and daughter that never quite healed. Ned is also an heir-to a chain of home-style diners-and while he doesn't have a head for business, he knows his family's chain could provide a better future than his wife's fading restaurant. In the aftermath of a devastating tragedy, Ned and Mariel lose almost everything they hold dear, and the hard-won victories of each family hang in the balance. With their dreams dashed, can one fractured family find a way to rebuild despite their losses, and will the Lakeside Supper Club be their salvation?
No Two Persons
by Erica Bauermeister
That was the beauty of books, wasn't it? They took you places you didn't know you needed to go... Alice has always wanted to be a writer. Her talent is innate, but her stories remain safe and detached, until a devastating event breaks her heart open, and she creates a stunning debut novel. Her words, in turn, find their way to readers, from a teenager hiding her homelessness, to a free diver pushing himself beyond endurance, an artist furious at the world around her, a bookseller in search of love, a widower rent by grief. Each one is drawn into Alice's novel; each one discovers something different that alters their perspective, and presents new pathways forward for their lives. Together, their stories reveal how books can affect us in the most beautiful and unexpected of ways-and how we are all more closely connected to one another than we might think.
