Customer Reviews
Booker List? You Gotta Be Kidding - By: Italia 2004, 07 Aug 2008 
I see all the excellent novels passed over on both the long & short lists for the Booker, then along comes a derivative, self-important book like this & I admit I feel a bit aggrieved. A 10-year-old who starts a detective agency with a stuffed monkey but is her school's second smartest student? The character of Kate is so badly constructed that she's totally unbelievable. Her age level seems to vary between 4 & 40. As for the rest of the book, come on, some people actually like to shop, & work, at the mall. It's not Sartre's no exit, it's a shopping center. I'm so bored with immature writers scribbling as if any place that gives people the opportunity to buy thingsin multiple shops rather than the over-priced high street with its dusty goods (andin this book) spoiled meats is the 21st century version of hell. I skimmed the last 50% of this book, not being able to another entire page of the daily life of mall employees.
A wonderful story - By: Mrs. Katharine Kirby, 30 Jul 2008 
A delightfully complete read with an intriguing new angle on shopping evolution. Immediately you feel at homein Kate's company & enjoy her innocent way of looking at the world around her - it is such a funny book as well as being a mystery, a psychological thriller & a romantic story.
The idea of a shopping centre having somethingin common with vast old cathedrals & medieval buildings is a thoughtful touch. The thoughts that pass through the minds of the shoppers & other occupants of the building are utterly realistic.
The characters are all right on target, their regrets, fears & inhibitions all too understandable.
I loved it, read itin a day & hurried to lend it on. A fresh & friendly read with good human stories that lingerin the mind afterwards. Everything falls into place.....
what was a great book - By: Love Books, 23 Jul 2008 
The first part of this book is absolutely brilliant, because we're followingin the footsteps of would-be detective Kate Meaney & her sidekick stuffed monkey & both are charming, quirky, funny heroes & we really care about what happens to them. Then we jump forward 20 years, to the shopping mall which is the gloomy, ghostly, cavernous entity at the centre of the book. Bereaved security guard, Kurt, sees a small girl on the camera late at night, & he & his tentative new friend Lisa, set out to find the truth about the child. I actually liked both Kurt & Lisa, I thought they were rounded characters, but the book does dragin the middle. The suspense we feel the first time Kurt sees Kate on the camera just isn't sustained & there's no particular reason for the ghost to be there. The mystery of Kate's disappearance is solved, but nothing really changes.
There are also rather a lot of coincidences & people forget really important things & then remember them when its convenient to the plot.
I really, really enjoyed reading this book, but when I reached the end & thought about it, I felt a little let down. It's not a five-star read, but I would have given it four-and-a-half if I could!
Average - By: A. Kelly, 21 Jul 2008 
The premise of the book is an original one, starting with a young girl & a shopping mall. The book starts strongly but you are let downin the middle & I felt the book did not pick up again until right at the end of the story when all is revealed.
I felt the characters were a bit flimsy & it was not a book that I really, really wanted to read or one of those books that you can't put down. The book is easy to read & because the story & plot are very different to the majority of books I would recommend borrowing it from someone you know or a library but I am unsure if it is worth purachasing.
"It was going to be a truly hellish day at Your Music" - By: Dr. Cath L. Murphy, 13 Jul 2008 
Hmmm. This would smell of "first novel" to me even if this wasn't advertised all over the front cover. How can I tell? you ask wide eyed. Perhaps it's the heavy reliance on personal experience (the sweet shop, the early eighties primary school, the shopping centre), perhaps it's the switch from one writing style to another to showcase that the author has Technique, perhaps it's the heavy editing which always, always shows, just like the alterations on a cheap suit, perhaps it's the use of the ghost story, a standard support for flimsy plots & a favourite of the aspiring scribbler, because so many of us got hooked on reading through that particular genre.
Having said all that, it's a decent enough, if wildly overpraised first attempt. A lonely young girl, whose diaries we read at the beginning of the book, fantasises about being a private eye & spends time at the recently constructed local shopping centre pretending to solve crime. One day, she disappears. Twenty years later, her disappearance is still unsolved, but her image appears on the CCTV of the same shopping centre, pulling a security guard & a shop assistant into reinvestigating what really happened years ago. There are a couple of fairly predictable plot twists & that's about it.
Thematically, O'Flynn is going for a critique of consumer culture, the point so brilliantly captured by the zombies staggering around the mallin Romero's "Dawn of the Dead". Shopping makes ghosts of us all. The trouble is that the fate of the girl & the journey of the characters has no relationship to that theme, so the exercise becomes as empty as the night time corridors of the Green Oaks Centre & left me with the unsatisfied feeling a whole day shopping for things I don't really need gives me.
