Reviewing books - Elizabeth Kay

Since I’ve become a regular book reviewer, I’m looking at reading in a different way entirely.
     I’m meant to write about books that I’ve enjoyed, that appeal to a mainly middle-class middle-aged (but not elderly) female audience; two books a month.
          This was easy to begin with; there were so many novels that leapt out – Wolf Hall, Elephant Moon, A Thousand Splendid Suns. But you can’t keep reviewing the same author – one book is enough.
          Then there were the re-issues. What fun – The Day of the Triffids, The King Must Die. Electric Authors and other author friends were a good source, too – but the books must be adult, not children’s or YA, and fairness does come into it.
          A friend’s recommendation usually works well, too, and it was my daughter who recommended We Are All completely Beside Ourselves, which I loved. There’s a real problem with books like that which have a clever twist in them, as there lies the originality but to give any of it away is a spoiler, and you wouldn’t want to destroy the shock/horror/surprise on which the book relies.
          This is very true of books such as We Need to Talk about Kevin, and Gone Girl. Writing reviews about books like this is very difficult, particularly as you really want to encourage people to read them.
          On holiday a couple of years ago I met an English teacher, who told me she always read the last

 page of a book first to see if she was going to enjoy it. She couldn’t understand my attitude when I tried to point out that writers may spend a long time and great deal of thought coming up with the perfect ending – satisfying, but a surprise at the same time. I do hope she didn’t teach all her students to do the same thing.

Then there are also the self-published books that are sent directly to the magazine in the hope that you’ll give them some free publicity. I haven’t had a good one yet. Either they’re so appallingly edited that you can’t get beyond the first few pages for all the typos and layout issues, or they’re beautifully presented and so boring that you fall asleep every time you struggle through a few more pages. That’s when you start looking at other reviews, to see things that might appeal, and Amazon bestsellers because you’d rather read these books on your Kindle as you don’t have any empty bookshelves left. And here’s the rub…

            How do you select them, when you’ve never heard of the author, and you’d like to give someone new a boost? The ones with lots of reviews seem like a good bet, but the reviews are frequently contradictory so thank heavens for the Read Inside facility. This weeds out the majority straight away, as a mistake in the first paragraph isn’t a good advert. And it’s not just the self-published ones that fall into this category – quite a few reputable publishers seem to have lost the plot when it comes to proofing e-books.

            If the book passes the Read Inside test, it can move up into the Send a Sample level. This is when you discover that the promising first couple of pages may well have been rigorously edited by a more literate friend, and the rest doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. So that weeds out some more – but all this takes time, and you’re not paid for the ones you reject.

            So – you’ve got one where the author understands the purpose of punctuation, the text doesn’t have any typos, and the plot has held your interest for the first chapter.
          You buy the book, hoping that this will give you the material you need for one half of this month’s submission. And then your interest begins to waver. It could be that you find a factual error. This immediately stops you believing the rest of the book, because either your author doesn’t know much about the setting/period/scientific content, or they don’t bother to research it.
         Then there are the characters who simply disappear without any explanation. This is almost certainly because the author has decided to excise a plotline, and hasn’t removed all of it. And then there are the books that just don’t work. You read fifty percent of it, hoping that things will tie up in a satisfactory way. By seventy-five percent you’re fairly sure they won’t, but you don’t stop reading because you need that review, and if there’s half a chance things will pan out you don’t want to have wasted all that reading time.

            You get to the end. How on earth can you recommend this as something you’ve enjoyed? You can’t. It doesn’t leave that feeling of fulfilment that you get from a well-written story. So you start the procedure all over again.

            The next time you want to shoot a reviewer, bear this in mind: it’s not as easy as it looks.

Of course, as authors we’ve all been reviewed ourselves, both fairly and unfairly. The most infuriating one I ever remember when was when someone accused me of incompetence because I used coincidence. He/she stated that my main character just happened upon the other main character, when in fact meeting up was the whole purpose of the visit.
I think it annoyed me the most because it was so specific, and so incorrect. The ones that just slate something with no explanation can be ignored, and you hope that readers will ignore them too. I’m never quite sure how much websites check the provenance of their reviews, but some years ago my book The Divide was the subject of a running battle between two kids. One of them was a fan of my book, and the other the fan of another author. Day after day they rubbished each other’s books – easy to spot when they make the same spelling mistakes over and over again, although they signed themselves as someone else each time. The trouble was, although these reviews could be ignored my ranking went down and down as a result.

So – how much do you rely on reviews to select a book? Do the ones in a newspaper carry more weight than web-based reviews? Is it the length of the piece, or the quality of the writing, or the enthusiasm of the reviewer? Or do you just not bother with reviews at all?