The Mall Blog Tour

We are headed back to 1991, baby!

Title: The Mall
Author: Megan McCafferty
Genre: YA Historical Fiction
Publication Date: July 28th, 2020
Ratings: ♥♥♥.5

Goodreads Summary:

New York Times bestselling author Megan McCafferty returns to her roots with this YA coming of age story set in a New Jersey mall.

The year is 1991. Scrunchies, mixtapes and 90210 are, like, totally fresh. Cassie Worthy is psyched to spend the summer after graduation working at the Parkway Center Mall. In six weeks, she and her boyfriend head off to college in NYC to fulfill The Plan: higher education and happily ever after.

But you know what they say about the best laid plans…

Set entirely in a classic “monument to consumerism,” the novel follows Cassie as she finds friendship, love, and ultimately herself, in the most unexpected of places. Megan McCafferty, beloved New York Times bestselling author of the Jessica Darling series, takes readers on an epic trip back in time to The Mall.

I LOVED the Jessica Darling series back in the day and it was great to return to Megan McCafferty’s writing.

This was a lot of fun! It was very nostalgic that—as a 90’s girl—I very much appreciated, but might alienate some readers who don’t understand the references. It was so clever to set the entirety of the book at the mall. In the early 90’s, teens spent all their time at the mall because that all there was to do.

I wasn’t expecting for this to be a tale of rekindling friendships, but once Cassie is left with no job, she finds herself in the shop owned by her ex best friend’s mom. She is whisked away to the back where she ultimately accepts a position as a bookkeeper until she leaves for college in a few months.  Drea and Cassie are now forced to work together and come to terms with how their friendship crumbled in the first place. While hijinks, ex boyfriends, and a little bit of love follow these girls as they travel through the mall, at the end of the day their friendship is the most compelling part of the book.

In all, this was entertaining. Did it grab me emotionally or deliver much depth? No, but it offered an entertaining, albeit cheesy, 300-pages of distraction.

ARC was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.