**Many thanks to NetGalley, Random House-Ballantine, and Delia Cai for an ARC of this book!**

You can ALWAYS go home again...but in Audrey's case, maybe you just shouldn't.

From Central Illinois to Central Park: Audrey Zhou left her small town of Hickory Grove behind many years ago and has put down roots in NYC, where she has a successful career and a well-to-do hunky fiance Ben, who pays for the couple's brownstone. When Christmas rolls around, Audrey realizes it's time to take Ben home to Meet The Parents and see just how Hickory Grove informed Audrey's younger years.

When she gets there, however, all of the unfinished business she left behind comes rushing back to meet her in the form of bitter ex-friends, and a certain high school crush, Kyle, who still makes her heart go pitter-patter. Will this trip be the defining and healing moment Audrey has been waiting for before settling into marital bliss with Ben? Or will the pain and the distance she has put between herself and her former friends (and her lingering feelings for Kyle) send her spiraling back into unhealthy patterns...and change the trajectory of her life forever?

Delia Cai comes to the world of fiction from the world of Vanity Fair, where she was vanities correspondent: and in some ways, this is VERY evident in her characterization of the self-absorbed and selfish character that is Audrey Zhou. I started off this read thinking I'd connect with her as an aspiring City Mouse who actually spent a few years in Central Illinois myself...but other than tossing in references to Menard's and aimlessly wasting time driving around (because there wasn't much else to do) and of course Audrey's love for the Harry Potter books, there wasn't too much I'd consider redeemable in this character. Honestly, it seemed like the character was MUCH younger than she actually was and I kept shaking my head while reading about bad decision after bad decision.

It was hard to be invested in Audrey's emotional journey or to feel any sympathy towards her when it was shown over and over that she CREATED most of her own problems with her friendships (and even had the self awareness to admit it!) and yet couldn't understand why she wasn't welcomed back with open arms. The author also mentions the character's obsession with Matcha tea and how it was SO unavailable in Central Illinois...another fact that isn't quite true and yet was repeated over and over, along with scoffing at Panera and all sorts of behavior that was impolite at best. Audrey also went back and forth between being irritated by Ben and thinking he was the Best Guy Ever, so I honestly couldn't understand why he put up with her in the first place.

Add to all of this to a VERY predictable third act conflict (basically a foregone conclusion) and it was hard to stop rolling my eyes. Reading this directly after a lovely and well-written bildungsroman further emphasized the lack of growth in the main character of this book, and had me wishing that, above all else, she'd just grow up

2.5 stars, rounded up

Audrey and Ben are a classic Brooklyn duo. He grew up in the city, raised by wealthy-ish parents who encouraged him to pursue his dreams. She grew up in small-town Illinois, raised by Chinese immigrants who demanded she be the best. Now they're engaged, and Ben wants to meet Audrey's parents. But when they travel to Audrey's childhood home, the pains and betrayals of her adolescence are awakened, revealing the cracks in Audrey's city persona and the fissures in Audrey and Ben's relationship.

This was such a wonderful depiction of young adulthood as a series of migrations and displacements. Audrey feels set apart from her family and friends as a teenager; from her fiance and fellow young urbanites as an adult, and then - in a new and unexpected way - from her former classmates when she returns home. Her journey echoes her parents' departure from their own home as young adults, and contrasts with Ben's ability to feel at home all over the world.

Audrey wasn't always the easiest character to like. She was self-centered, snobby, and demanding, and she was undeservedly angry at most of the other characters for most of the book. And yet her narration was both highly readable (due to terrific writing) and compelling (due to pitch-perfect attention to Audrey's emotions). I wouldn't want to be friends with Audrey in real life, but I really wanted to read her story.

Beautiful writing with realistic characters and an interesting premise with the reconciliation of the past and present. A great debut from Delia Cai!

Read it in one day and basically one sitting, then went to a book release event with the author where she said part of why she wrote the book was to have something to hold up to other people and say “do you feel this way too?” Safe to say that my answer would be a definitive yes.

As a first generation ABC, this book was relatable on so many levels for me - I even live in Brooklyn and have the same initials as the main character. The dynamics of filial piety, feeling othered in your home country, feeling distant from your “home self” all resonated deeply with me. Part of me wished that the love triangle hadn’t been such a big part of the plot as I felt it distracted from the diaspora themes that resonated with me more, but I recognize that it was also a plot device for the purposes of the main character’s growth. Overall, this was an excellent and deeply moving debut and I look forward to reading whatever Delia Cai writes next.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

so I finished @deeeliacai Central Places while I was putting the baby I nanny to sleep. That’s how gripped I was that I couldn’t bear to wait another 20 min before I could read more. Audrey is a complex character who honestly has no idea what she wants. She has built an entire life for herself in NY and keeps it separate from her childhood growing up in Illinois. The stress of letting these worlds collide festers and ends up presenting itself in so many regrettable ways. Audrey bears the stresses and delights of having immigrant parents, and as someone with an immigrant mother myself, I really found myself feeling like someone else out there understands. Go read #CentralPlaces if you liked Yolk by Mary K. Choi & You Made A Fool of Death With Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi.

I was afraid this would veer too much into Sweet Home Alabama territory, but there's more nuance and less stereotyping here. While the transitions are a little clunky--some of the character motivations are unclear or don't make sense--Audrey's reframing of her sense of self is gradual enough to feel realistic and relatable; she doesn't transform overnight from the NYC gal she's become over the past several years. Her mother, though harsh, also becomes a sympathetic character eventually. Overall, this is a reflective yet entertaining book on what one's idea of home and family can become.

I liked this one but didn't love it. The characters are complex. I really struggled with actually liking the characters. Audrey was awful, her parents were awful, and Ben was only great for a minute. Many parts of the story spoke to me but a lot was lost on me too. Some things just weren't needed. I enjoyed her talking to people from her past and resolving issues that she ran from. I appreciate that. I do recommend this book.

Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and Random House Publishing/ Ballantine Books for the gifted e-book ❤️

Wow, this was a really great debut novel. I felt like this was an accurate portrayal of a lot of AAPI kids and their relationships with their parents. I liked how realistic this felt! As someone who is AAPI it really resonated with me. I understood the struggles of our MCs complication relationship with her mother.

I did struggle at times to like Audrey. She felt immature and inconsiderate on many occasions. But seeing her character development was enjoyable. The book was beautifully written and I really enjoyed the ending. Well paced, and hauntingly honest. I look forward to future work from this author.

4 stars out of 5! Thank you Netgalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!

central places centers around audrey zhou, who after moving out of her hometown in the midwest to new york is returning for the first time in a while, with her fiancée in tow. this visit is incredibly revealing for audrey’s character and as she visits old friends and tackles her tumultuous relationship with her parents, she unwittingly embarks on a journey of self discovery.

truly, this entire book feels like catharsis for everyone involved: me, the author, and audrey, the character were reading about. and it kind of makes it hard to read in the best way. the entire time i was reading i felt my heart being squeezed and a vague sense of discomfort which i think makes this book so exemplary. even though i didn’t grow up in the midwest, the child of immigrant experience is truly similar for us all and i both related to audrey incredibly so and enjoyed in discovering her differing viewpoint regarding her upbringing and culture. i don’t have any thoughts besides i believe that the author poured her entire being into this book and i couldn’t be more grateful because in turn, i feel changed. this is a book that you can’t really sit down and read casually and lucky for me i love books that have the ability to wreck me! i did not cry but i got very emotional multiple times and i think that’s even more harder to do. thank you to netgalley and random house for the arc!

Central Places had an interesting take on someone who was stuck in the past without really realizing it.

Audrey is an Asian American living what she thought was her best life in NYC rarely coming home to her small hometown of Hickory Grove to visit her parents. She brings her fiance, Ben, home to meet her parents when her father has to have a medical procedure.

Her best girlfriend doesn't want to see her since she hasn't spoken to her since their freshman year in college, but her best guy friend, Kyle, is nothing but friendly to her even though she also hasn't spoken to him since the summer after high school graduation. She had always had the biggest crush on Kyle so she started to have those old feelings again and fall back into hanging out with him.

In the meantime, Ben has to leave Hickory Grove for work and Audrey starts to really examine herself and her relationships and she realizes that some things aren't what they seemed. She also knows she needs to make amends to people she has hurt in her past and her current life.

I really loved the first half of the book, but it lost me just a little in the 2nd half when she treated her fiance poorly and would ignore texts from him and others as she tried to figure things out making them just as confused as she was. However, I am sure that there are many people that have similar realizations when they return back to where they grew up and are most comfortable.

Twenty-seven-year-old Audrey Zhou is leading a life most of us would be envious of. Living in New York City as a sales rep for a newspaper, she has many friends and is engaged to a witty and handsome man from a wealthy family.

In contrast, Audrey is from Hickory Grove, Illinois, a small Midwestern town, where she hasn’t been back to for eight years. As the daughter of working-class Chinese immigrants, she felt like an outsider. Add to that, she always had a contentious relationship with her mother and didn’t understand her father.

When her fiancé Ben wants to meet her parents, which means spending Christmas in Hickory Grove, Audrey panics. She is desperately trying to leave her past behind, especially Hickory Grove which she feels was toxic and suffocating.

But what ensues is what no one, especially Audrey herself expects. She not only sees her parents after all this time, but also runs into old friends in which she has unresolved issues with. The visit brings out tensions and irrational and self-destructive behavior. But there’s more to it.

Though I couldn’t understand all of Audrey’s choices, I did relate to wanting to leave one’s past behind and the people and memories that come with it.

Central Places takes a common, relatable situation and makes it one that most will enjoy reading and find difficult to put down.

This one was just meh for me. I liked the premise. I liked that I could literally feel the tension during the conflicts and arguments. It reminded me of Crying in H Mart at times when describing the Asian-American/immigrant/mother-daughter relationships and struggles. I did not like Audrey though. She was just so unlikable to me. I don’t want to spoil anything so I won’t go into deeper detail of why I really didn’t like her. I got bored with the story and was just reading to finish it by the end. I probably should have just DNF’ed it but I’m not good at that lol.

Central places follows Audrey, a Chinese American woman who the job and a fiance, she loves. Ben, her white fiancé decides for them to take a trip to Chicago, Audrey’s hometown to meet her parents. When they arrive, Audrey must face her past, her complicated relationship with her mother, and her relationship with Ben. I loved the story and the concept of it, however, the story was rushed. I wanted more on Audrey and her relationship with her mother, since that was a major focus in the book. Audrey’s character development was lacking. As I kept reading, I felt so annoyed at Audrey hoping she would at least change by the end of the novel. I think the author did an amazing job showing the readers Audrey’s complicated relationship with her mother, but how the author decided to resolve their tension didn’t make sense to me. At some point in the novel, I related to Audrey. The complicated relationship with your immigrant mother, I relate to that. Audrey and Ben’s romance was interesting to say the least. There wasn’t a connection between them and Ben annoyed me throughout the book. Then there was Kyle, no chemistry between him and Audrey. I wanted more for Audrey, and to see her grow. I really loved the concept of this book, and Delia Cai’s writing style. Thank you to Random House for my advanced readers copy of this book.

Sometimes it is hard to live up to a parent’s expectations. Audrey Zhou grew up feeling that she was never good enough for her mother, who set strict limitations on her daughter and always expected her best. When Audrey graduated college she refused to attend graduate school, causing a rift in the family. She moved to New York instead, where she worked for a magazine. She has not been back to the small town in Illinois where she grew up for eight years and has limited calls to her parents to just a few each year. Now she is engaged to Ben, a rising photojournalist, who agrees to a Christmas visit to meet her parents. Originally from China, her mother switches to Mandarin whenever she criticizes Audrey or her choice of a future husband, while her father seems to genuinely like Ben. Trouble begins and doubts creep in when Audrey runs into Kyle, a close friend throughout school that she secretly had a crush on.

In New York Audrey was happy with her life as “new Audrey”, but coming home she has to confront “old Audrey”, including the life and friends that she lost contact with. She also realizes that Ben, who made her life so easy in New York, is actually more controlling than she realized. Delia Cai’s story explores the mother-daughter relationship, the changes that take place over time and the real meaning of home and family, making Central Places a book that is easy to recommend. I would like to thank NetGalley and Random House/Ballantine for providing this book for my review.

We're interesting book I like how She had to come to towns with her life. Audrey grew up in the Midwest as a Chinese person I'. This place was in Illinois outside of Chicago. It was small town America and she was one of the only Chinese people in the school. She know she went to New York and she had a very different life there and she was very happy. She met a guy named Ben Who became her Partner to be married. Ben was a photographer for different newspapers Magazine Ben Grow up on the upper West side in New York City And he was very Very wealthy. Audrey wanted this type of life because she thought it was very Remember glamorous compared to her life I And where she grew I j Find out what her childhood is like and she comes home with Christmas with SBEN. Her mother was very nasty to her father was OK with everything. . Things start to know how to sideways When It's her own friend KYLO. Then an Audrey started hanging out with Kayla And Ben. Then we're having a hard time because your family really couldn't understand him. Audrey was trying to go off the rails because her mother was making her very jumpy. And it was really interesting to see how like sometimes changes when you go away for 8 years and then you come back.. Audrey was trying to show Ben T How Life was when she was going up when she went to M ALLS And driving around her car. Ben was trying to really understa But he came from a different type of life. I like how everybody is playing with chess pieces and And how all this put in together in the book everybody had a different piece of Chess board and everybody seemed to have different says and different views in this book I think Audrey made up with her friends and how she accepted her family at that point. There's a great ending to this book Your Love it

Wonderful debut. A novel about growing up, recognizing your roots, and what it means to want different things from your parents, and well as realizing that maybe you need/want those roots after all. A story of an immigrant family, and how it feels to grow up in the very white midwest as a Chinese-American. Audrey is a wonderfully complicated character - any woman who's survived her 20s will recognize at least some part of herself in Audrey.

"Audrey Zhou left Hickory Grove, the tiny town in central Illinois where she grew up, as soon as high school ended, and she never looked back. She moved to New York City and became the person she always wanted to be, complete with a high-paying, high-pressure job and a seemingly faultless fiancé, Ben. But if she and Manhattan-bred Ben are to build a life together, in the dream home his parents will surely pay for, Audrey can no longer hide him, or the person she's become, from those she left behind.

But returning to Hickory Grove is . . . complicated. Audrey's relationship with her parents has been soured by years of her mother's astronomical expectations and slights. The friends she's shirked for bigger dreams have stayed behind and started families. And then there's Kyle, the easygoing stoner and her unrequited crush from high school that she finds herself drawn to again. Ben might be a perfect fit for New Audrey, but Kyle was always the only one who truly understood her growing up, and being around him again after all these years has Old Audrey bubbling up to the surface.

Over the course of one disastrous week, Audrey's proximity to her family and to Kyle forces her to confront the past and reexamine her fraught connection to her roots before she undoes everything she's worked toward and everything she's imagined for herself. But is that life really the one she wants?"

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House/Ballantine for the free ARC in exchange for my honest review. All opinions expressed herein are my own.

Central Places is an immersive character driven debut by Delia Cai. We follow Audrey Zhou, daughter of Chinese immigrants, as she returns home to a small midwestern town after many years away in NYC, white fiancé Ben in tow. Audrey has an incredibly tense relationship with her "central places," namely her parents and the friends she left behind. She is at times an absolutely infuriating character, but I appreciated seeing experiences through her eyes, and her evolution over the course of the book.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House - Ballantine for the advanced copy, in exchange for my honest review.

“I’d never imagined not having a tether, however flimsy, leading back to this central place.”

This was a great debut novel from Vanity Fair writer Delia Cai. It’s a story about finding yourself. A story about complex family relationships, nostalgia, old friends, and finding out that sometimes things don’t work out quite the way you expect them to— and learning to accept this.

I seem to be reading a lot of books with tense mother-daughter relationships lately, and this book is no exception. Observing the relationship between Audrey and her Chinese immigrant parents, her mother in particular, was at times heartbreaking, and others heartwarming. I felt Audrey’s pain in her arguments with her mother, and felt the discomfort at watching her white fiancé navigate Audrey’s family, so foreign and different from his own wealthy parents and presumably privileged youth.

The element of the book that stuck with me most was the main subject of the book: Audrey returning to her childhood hometown after years of separating herself from her old life, old friends, and old flames. I liked how her attitude changes as the story progresses and she realizes what she missed all those years away from home, how she begins to discover what “home” really means.

Maybe this was the intention of the author, maybe not, but I did not like her fiancé Ben very much at all. Big shot photojournalist sounds appealing on the surface but he gradually lost brownie points with me throughout the book and I just…no. On the other hand, I adored Kyle’s easygoing nature and the way he and Audrey seemed to pick up right where they left off. I also enjoyed Audrey’s friendships with old friends like Kristen and new ones like Zadie, and her parents also grew on me big time by the end of the book.

This was the perfect read to compliment the Lunar New Year, and I hope that it gets the attention it deserves once released, because there is something in it for every single reader to relate to.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House - Ballantine for the advanced copy!

I couldn't put Central Places down! The author does an incredible job of really putting you inside the mind of her main character, Audrey Zhou. Audrey's decision-making will frustrate you at times and then you turn the page and there is an emotional gut punch waiting. No spoilers but there is one sweet scene between Audrey and her dad in the kitchen that will linger with me for a while. Fantastic read!

Actual rating 3.5

You can't go home again, except when you have to. That's pretty much the idea behind Audrey's journey back to her hometown to introduce her fiance to her parents. I loved the idea of challenging home visits and the dynamics that play out, but the problem here is that Audrey was just a bit too unlikeable. The parents were very realistically portrayed and even though the mother was also on the unlikeable side, I was able to reserve irritation with her more than I was with Audrey. Perhaps I'm too far removed from her experiences to understand her position? Or maybe I've been a mother for too many years to be as accepting of adult immaturity? At any rate, Audrey kind of ruined the story for me, which is a shame. The ending resolution also felt too rushed to be realistic based on how the rest of the story had played out. That said, Cai did an excellent job of putting the reader in place with her descriptions of life in the Midwest and everything that it entails.

My thanks to Ballantine Books, the author, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for an honest review.