Adult Readers Advisory Week Five Prompt: A Review of Reviews

You can read the prompt for this assignment by clicking here. 

Ah, book reviews. You can be so very helpful, but you're certainly not a collection development or readers advisory silver bullet.

First of all, I am not a fan of the idea of not publishing bad reviews. What constitutes a "good book" is highly subjective, and what one reader might hate, another may love. Plus, when a review is well-written, it's often easy to tell if you'll like the book (or movie, or TV show, or whatever) even if the reviewer didn't. I write movie reviews on the side for our local newspaper (you can read my reviews here), and I try to give people an overview of what the movie is like so they know if they'll like it even if I hated it. Even in my most scathing review in recent memory, my review of "The Best Of Me" (based on the Nicholas Sparks book), I tried to at least pay lip service to the fact that people who like Sparks' books and movies will probably enjoy the movie.

The lack of reviews of bad material also can make it harder to serve a library's patron base. Let's face it, there are a lot of people who like books that are considered by people doing reviews to be "bad books." Libraries have to walk that difficult line of making sure the library has the "good books" (award-winning, well-reviewed, literary) while still serving the needs of the patrons who are clamoring for "bad books" (like "Fifty Shades of Grey"). By at least getting the word out there that a "bad book" in a genre or subgenre that is like catnip for your patron base has been published, review publishers can help librarians have what patrons want.

The lack of reviews for books only published as e-books is also a difficult question. While the stigma is going away, I sometimes get the feeling that there is still an idea in most peoples' heads that books that are only published as e-books are books that just aren't good enough to be published as "real" books. That's not entirely true, though. Romance and, especially, erotic romance and erotica can thrive as e-books, and readers who are fans of those books flock to them. Again, it hinders librarians from selecting and collecting the books that their patrons want when these books aren't reviewed and may not be on the librarian's radar.

However, if a librarian is selecting books in a particular genre that is either often considered "bad" (or has a patron base that likes these "bad" books), doesn't get reviewed a lot, or has a lot of e-book only books (and is selecting e-books), then the librarian has to find different places to get their collection development information. I am the romance selector for my library, and while I read Kirkus and Library Journal, I get a lot more helpful information about what romance readers are reading from good review blogs like Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and Dear Author. It's especially helpful with all of the little subgenres that exist in romance that don't necessarily get covered in review journals very often but are popular with readers. It's hard for busy librarians to go to so many sites, though, and so the less covered genres and subgenres get missed, to the detriment of the library patron.

And that brings me to the discussion of the reviews that were posted. The e-book-only reviews (one from Amazon and one from a blog) of "The Billionaire's First Christmas" are not great. There are a few things that may be helpful to readers, like the fact that the book has a dual point-of-view, or that it's a "clean" book (which is probably code for "no explicit sex," which is good for romance readers to know), or that it's a quick, light read, but neither review really digs into the feel of the book, and neither reviewer really examines why they liked or disliked the book. The reviews also have fairly poor grammar and are written incredibly casually; they feel like a quick email I would dash off to my sister to tell her about a book I had just finished. They feel unprofessional, and it doesn't make me trust their opinions because it doesn't seem like they've given it much thought. They also have the feel of "just one person's opinion," without thinking about ways to help the people reading the reviews know if this book would be their cup of tea.

Also, I'm not sure that this is romantic suspense; it looks more like just a contemporary romance to me. There is a little bit of danger for the heroine, but it sounds too cozy to be a modern romantic suspense book. If it is a romantic suspense, the reviews really didn't do a good job describing it.

The professional reviews of "Angela's Ashes," on the other hand, give the reader a solid synopsis. We also get the feel of the book with examples. The Booklist review, for example, has this great line: "McCourt spares us no details: the stench of the one toilet shared by an entire street, the insults of the charity officers, the maurauding rats, the street fights, the infected eyes, the fleas in the mattress . . . Yet he found a way to love in that miserable Limerick, and it is love one remembers as the dominant flavor in this Irish stew." That is a great sentence that gives you the feel of the book. The reviews tell me that it's going to be an intense, tough, and heartbreaking read, but that there will be transcendent moments of joy and humor, too. I can then decide: Do I want to read this book? Do my patrons like books like this? The reviews are all so strong, and it sounds like the kind of interesting, uplifting book that many people at my library like to read; I would purchase it for the collection.

I don't want people to think that only professional reviews in journals are worthwhile, though. SBTB uses less formal, more "chatty" and snarky language on its blog and the reviews are longer, but they are also helpful to get the idea of a book even if the reviewer wasn't a fan of the book (unless they're categorized as a "Rant," and then not helpful but often really funny). A good example is the review of "Liar's Game" by Kait Gamble. The reviewer gives examples of what the world feels like, what the characters are like, and what she thinks works and doesn't work in the book.