Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

One of these days I will learn that me and short stories just don't get on. These weren't bad but they just left me wanting more which I always find so unsatisfactory.

I have to say as short stories go I don't really get what's happening in this book. They seem less like short stories and rather like the introductory chapter to a longer story or a book. The stories just end, with no twist, no closure, just stop = leaving no indication of what the point of the story was. The characters aren't fully developed giving the impression this is groundwork for character building.

As introductions to longer stories I think they would be a lot more successful, as I was often left thinking "I wonder what happens next" indicating I would perhaps read on if it were a book.

On the positive side, it was interesting finding out about Pakistani culture, and what living in the country was like as this is a culture I know little about.

As always, I try to read as little about the book I am going into as possible (save from the blurb) and often I have a pile of books in my 'to read' pile and by the time I get to them I have forgotten specifics - I do always trust past me to have chose well. This was one of those cases and although the short story format took me by surprise when the first story ended suddenly and I was brought into a new one. Although the transition wasn't immediately obvious (though this might be the formatting of the kindle) I enjoyed the stories.
There were a handful of stories overall with a couple linked by events or characters and the author revisited one family in two stories.
I enjoyed the character development, despite being short stories, the characters feel full and familiar. They are finding their footing in unfamiliar events, they are growing and changing and as readers we join them for a moment and are left wondering what's next for them. Having said that though, the stories are not incomplete, the characters make a mark on the reader.

This was unlike anything I’ve ever read and I for that I really value it. I struggled to get into some of the stories but enjoyed it overall.

A series of sometimes-linked short stories set in contemporary Pakistan, which I really enjoyed as I haven’t read much fiction from there. Some of the stories are stronger than others but I enjoyed them all and it’s a fairly quick read. Recommended, thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

A nice collection of short stories! It wasn't as I expected but enjoyed them overall. Easy and a quick read.

Are you Enjoying? Well, no really, I'm not.
I really wanted to like this book. I thought it would be Mira Sethi's time to shine. However, this collection of short stories left me disappointed. I didn't enjoy Sethi's writing style. There was inadequate character exploration. The stories lacked depth and seemed to end quite abruptly, leaving a lack of closure for the reader. The first story, 'Mini Apple' seemed to be heavily inspired by Mohsin Hamid's 'Moth Smoke' and lacked uniqueness.
It would have been much better if Sethi had stuck to one story and created a novella out of it.

Are You Enjoying? is a collection of short stories by Pakistani writer Mira Sethi, covering a range of contemporary issues including bored divorcees looking for love and childhood best friends who marry to keep their true sexuality from being exposed. The story I thought was best involved a young actress facing her own #MeToo moment on the set of a career making film, exploring the difficulties of wanting to get to the next stage of your career but being put in an uncomfortable position by someone with power over you.

Unfortunately for me, I found the writing quite clunky and that it would flip from being quite flowing and coherent, to suddenly being very bad! The speech in particular wasn't well written and quite distracting; I can only liken it to a really bad translation by someone who has only watched Apu on The Simpsons and thinks that's how all South Asian people talk?! For example, a young man who was feeling down posted a topless photo of himself on social media and: “lots of 'like' came. Then I was relaxed.”, and: “So many comments coming on my page”.

I really wanted to love this but it just wasn't for me, which was a shame.

I didnt overly enjoy any of the short stories but I do feel like its an important book from a voice that is different to my own, about a country I know very little about so I found that really interesting and insightful.

I had to Google quite a lot of the terms and words in places but I kind of loved that about this book, I came away having learnt something new!

Unfortunately I didn’t much like this book. It was well written but I felt no connection to the characters and found them one dimensional. I also didn’t like them much which is a big thing for me. I ended the book and thought ‘is that it?’ rather than feeling the satisfaction of finishing a good read.

I enjoyed this book in parts but in other parts I felt it was a bit lacking.

Overall, this was an enjoyable book but I feel that there are some areas where characters could have been fleshed out a bit more and in some cases more brevity was required. Each story is well written in that you are fully immersed in the story and you get invested in what is going on.

I am ethnic myself (Asian) so a lot of this material was natural to me and I understood a lot of it without it having to be spelled out to me. I feel that this would be a great book for people who have had no exposure to Asian culture to get a better foot in the door of the culture.

Overall, I liked it but I feel I wasn't the target audience.

For a title called Are You Enjoying?, I ironically didn't enjoy this very much. A collection of short stories set in Pakistan, I was interested in the premises and characters in each of the stories, but the execution wasn't what I hoped it would be. I often found the dialogue quite clunky, there was a lot shoved into each of the stories, and they didn't feel as perfectly formed and shaped as a lot of the short stories I've read recently. My favourite story was about two best friends - one a lesbian, one a gay man - and how they navigated familial pressure, but the rest of the stories fell short of my expectations.

'Are You Enjoying?' by Mira Sethi is a compilation of slightly related short stories, all centred around characters from Pakistan. I don't know anything about Pakistan, apart from its troubles with India, so I came into all the stories with an open mind.

As with all story collections some of them felt a little bit flat; I just didn't find the main character in 'Mini Apple' interesting at all, but other stories made me wish for a continuation and searching the other stories for connections. One story that I found difficult to get into was 'A Life of Its Own' due to the number of names I had to keep track of within the first page, but I'm glad that I stuck with it as the story became larger and more interesting the more I read.

Of all the stories my favourite was probably 'A Man for His Time'. The story is written from the perspective of a male-student who is slowly becoming a stricter and stricter Muslim and the conflicts he comes across as he becomes more involved in his religion. If fiction is supposed to expand your horizons this story definitely did.

Sethi took me on a mini-tour of the country's problems and industries all within 200 pages. These stories are very much focused on exploring issues through the characters themselves, there's little description of setting but a lot of showing how the characters interact with where they are. I don't have a clue what Pakistan looks like, but I think I know the right questions to ask next time I meet someone from that part of the world.

Thoroughly enjoyed this collection of stories and the snapshots of the characters of each. It would have been five stars but I was craving to hear more from each character. I'm not usually a short story fan but I was gripped as I felt drawn into each character and the prejudices and struggles faced.

Sethi's collection of short stories is a solid debut; enjoyable and well-written, "Are You Enjoying?" provides a glimpse into contemporary Pakistan.

I found the portrayal of opposites in this book interesting- tradition vs modernity, East vs West, young and old, and the characters are all trying to navigate the various opportunities and pitfalls that lie between those contradictions.

I found the book really quite funny in many parts, with a lot of the humour coming either from the unexpectedness of the language (harsh and bitter swear words alongside the traditional language of politeness) or just the warm mockery of some of the characters who make silly decisions and seem to be at the mercy of their whims in a modern-day Pakistan that is full of temptations and distractions.

However, despite the many parts of this book that I enjoyed, it occasionally felt a bit fragmented to me, with characters seemingly disappearing and returning without much explanation, and so it occasionally felt contrastingly as if there were both too many characters and too few at the same time.

3.5 stars.

Thank you to Net Galley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.