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As a reader, a writer, and a former academic, I have encountered countless reviews, from various perspectives. I have written reviews for other authors, I have received reviews for my own books, and I have also read many reviews in general. And let me tell you this: most people don’t know how to review a book.

That is, they don’t know how to review a book fairly.

A fair review is useful to the author and other readers alike. Conversely, an unfair review isn’t useful to anyone – and it shouldn’t affect an author (though realistically it often does). In today’s post we’ll take a closer look at what it means to review a novel fairly, and how one can learn to do it. Sneak preview: Leave your personal preferences out of it.

 

How to Review a Book: The Writer-Reader Linkage

You might remember my post on meaning and audiences. There, I explained how each reader brings their own meaning every time they read, despite there being an “intended audience“.

However, this link between writer and intended audience is critical if our goal is to learn how to review a book fairly. In other words, it is pointless to review a book from your own perspective. It’s fine (indeed, that’s how literature operates) to form your own meaning and opinion on a book, but when you review it you must do so from the perspective of the intended audience.

Let me put it another way, and somewhat more bluntly. A prospective reader going through reviews doesn’t care about your personal preference – that is, whether you liked the book or not. This is what most inexperienced reviewers fail to realize.

A person reading your review wants factual information. Is it acceptable to voice your opinion and say that you liked or didn’t like something? Absolutely, but in order for this to be fair you must also justify it.

A Quick Example of an Unfair versus a Fair Review

Let’s see a practical example that will highlight what I’ve mentioned so far. This is entirely imaginary, I made it up for the purposes of this article. It’s also only a short example (a good review should be much more extended, covering several areas). If you’re interested in more complete examples of how to review a book properly, take a look at my book reviews here on this blog.

Unfair Review

I’ve read bad books, but few as bad as this one. I was really bored from the beginning, and it never got better. Honestly, I couldn’t wait for this torment to end. I disliked the characters, the plot was ridiculous, and the descriptions too scary. Not for me at all. I can’t recommend this book to others, except if you like this sort of books.

Fair Review

Let me say right away that I don’t like horror fiction, but I’ll try to be as objective as possible. Still, some of my observations might not be relevant, so take them with a grain of salt. This book began quite slowly, with barely anything concrete happening for quite a while. The first few chapters were little more than descriptions of settings (quite gory and disturbing, but somewhat naive and failing to convey an emotional response). It took a while for any plot or characters to appear, but I’m afraid things weren’t great there either. The characters were too simplistic and black-and-white, and the plot didn’t make much sense (at least to someone inexperienced with horror fiction; perhaps fans of the genre would see it differently).

How to Review a Book Fairly: Concrete Tips

As a conclusion, I thought to put together a quick list that should help you write better reviews, showing you how to review a book in a way that is useful to other readers and the author as well.

• Review as the intended audience. You are free not to like, say, detective fiction, but if you don’t at least have a vague idea what the intended audience looks for in such a book, then you have no business reviewing it. If you’re inexperienced with genre conventions and you suspect it might be relevant to your observations, make it explicit.
• Structure your review, the way you would with any text. Don’t just throw random information, but plan it in a coherent way. For example, you could first say a thing or two about your personal motivation or background story in picking this book (any personal opinions etc. can be mentioned here), and then proceed to the review itself. There you should structure what you have to say in terms of areas (plot, characters, relation to other books, language, etc.) and narrative evolution – that is, if you plan to talk about the beginning, the middle, and the end, do so in their natural order.
• Focus not on what you liked but on what worked, always doing so as intended audience. A romantic-fiction book that is predictable might not be something that you like, but it’s what works for the intended audience.
• Be analytic. Say why something works, explain why something else doesn’t. “The character of John was bad” is useless. “The character of John wasn’t very well written, as he didn’t seem realistic enough” is better. And “The character of John wasn’t realistic as he was too black-and-white, which created an odd effect in an otherwise great set of complex characters” is excellent.
• Do offer a comparative analysis, provided you know what you’re saying. A comparative analysis doesn’t mean “I liked this book less/more than book X”. It means to situate the book you’re reviewing in the wider context of similar books and its genre. Do generic conventions exist in the book, and which ones? Has the author deployed them adequately? Is the book reminiscent of a similar book of the same genre, and in which way?