Thinking Outside Our Box: Writing Useful Book Reviews

We can get so much more out of writing book reviews than just expressing our opinion.

I used to think that writing book reviews is an easy task. Besides, how many book reviews did I write when I was in school? I was actually quite good at it, so I just had to keep doing what I had always done, right? All I needed to do was to express my ideas and opinions clearly, maybe following a template, and I’d be on the way to do a good job.

I discovered long ago that this is not so. While it may be all good when we learn how to organise and express our ideas in school, this method falls very flat when we move from broadcasting our thoughts to trying to share them.

Sharing ideas requires a significant shift in attitude.

It was only when I started sharing my ideas, exchanging impressions with other likeminded readers, that I discovered there is a lot more to reviewing than tidily writing down what I think.

Writing book reviews is its own skill, its own communicating techniques. And it needs learning.

Why do we write book reviews?

This is a question we should always try to answer before we write a book review. Unless we are habitual book reviewers, it is quite unlikely that we’ll write a book review. We normally come to do it only if loved or if we hated a book. That’s perfectly acceptable. From this standpoint, the answer to the question is: I just need to get this out of my chest. And we do this by ‘expressing our ideas and opinions’ as we learned in school.

But let’s go a little further. Why do we need to get that out of our chest?

I’m a habitual reviewer, so I tend to review every book I read. But my younger self’s might have answered that question thus: this book gave me feelings, and I want to see whether other readers had the same experience.

Or, as a friend of mine would says: this book agitated my ideas and I need to think and talk this out to get back to a state of tranquillity. Afterwards, I’ll be not only a more serene reader, I’ll also be a richer person because of the new ideas I’ll have acquired by sharing my feeling about the book.

Yes, I do think there is a lot more about book reviewing than we usually credit it for.

But if we want to trigger a discussion, we can’t just broadcast our ideas about a book. We need a response. We need to allow that discussion to start. We need other readers’ reaction to the book and to our ideas.

Here is where our school training will fail us.

Sharing and reaching out

I realised this when, in addition to writing book reviews to published on all the usual places (comment section of online bookstores, blogs, and the like) I also started critiquing fellow writers’ stories, as fellow writers critiqued my stories.

Note this interchange, because this was essential in my shifting of perspective.

As a writer, I joined an online workshop because I wanted to have feedback on my stories, so to become a better storyteller. But as per the workshop rules, I had to critique other writers’ stories first.

I started critiquing the same way as I reviewed books, that is, giving my personal opinion and reaction to the story. Most of the time, I got back a similar kind of critique, but after a while, I noticed something. These critiques weren’t helping my desire to grow as a writer. I find all reviews interesting, and I’m grateful for every single one I received, but I noticed that the ones that only expressed the reader’s reaction, didn’t give me any direction to make the story better. Because the reviewer’s standpoint was, “I liked this, I disliked that, I’d had done that differently”, I didn’t have any space to act. Things changed when the reviewer elaborated on it. “I didn’t like this because…”. That was a more useful opinion. It became even more helpful when the reviewer didn’t give me his personal reason but tried to analyse the story itself. For example, when instead of telling me “I don’t like first-person narration”, they told me, “I don’t think first-person narration works well in this situation, and here’s why”.

when that reader didn’t just tell me their personal preferences and tried instead to analyse the story as it was written, we suddenly had a common ground where we could meet and discuss.

It was truly an epiphany when I realised why these two attitudes were so hugely different for me as the receiver of the critique. I could not — and would not — argue a reader’s personal preferences, but when that reader didn’t just tell me their personal preferences and tried instead to analyse the story as it was written, we suddenly had a common ground where we could meet and discuss.

On that common ground, there’s space for our personal preferences too, but the focus is on the story rather than on us.

Thinking outside our box

That produced a shift in the way I write critiques. Rather than concentrating on what I liked when I loved a story, and on what I didn’t like when I hated a story, I tried to balance my opinion. I started always to point out what I liked the most, and what I liked the least, regardless of whether I loved or hated the story.

This was an incredible exercise. It’s quite easy to say what we like when we love a story, or what we don’t like when we hate a story. But what of what we don’t like about a story we loved? Let’s face it, there is always something bad even about a story we love, and there is always something good even about a story we hated. We just never think about it if we don’t make an effort.

But the awesome think about trying to balance our opinions this way is that it encourages us to think outside the box. We loved the story, we want to only talk about what we love. But since no story is perfect, there must be something that didn’t really buy us even about that fantastic story. What is it?

This requires a shift in our attitude that moves our focus from us to the story itself. To find that thing that we didn’t like in the story we love, most of the time we have to step away from our personal likings and look at the story in a more objective way. We need to try and work out what doesn’t work — in our opinion, of course — rather than what we don’t like.

And this is what creates space for the other readers to meet on common ground.

We get out of our box and come to a place where we can meet and discuss ideas in a more thoughtful way.

Writing useful reviews

Today, I try to entirely avoid writing what I personally liked or disliked in a story (unless I totally loved something and I need to get it out of my chest — sometimes you just can’t avoid it) and try to focus on what works and doesn’t work in my opinion.

I’ve noticed that this attitude has sparkled quite a few interesting book discussion on my blog as well as on my social media. Some readers decided to read a book because of my positive review. But what gives me even more satisfaction is when a reader chooses to read a book in spite of my negative review. That means that I gave them space to think it out by themselves and to create their own opinion about the book.

It even happened to me that the author of a book I reviewed contacted me to thank me because I pointed out things that they hadn’t noticed.

This kind of attitude towards review has allowed me to grow as a writer too. When I concentrate on the story so to see what works and what doesn’t, I rely on an analysis of the narrative technique. This in turns enriches my understanding of the story’s mechanics, and often this falls back in a positive way on my own use of that narrative technique.

Book review writing is indeed its own way of communication and reflection. We can get a lot out of it — for us as well as for the readers who read our reviews — if we share our ideas instead of broadcasting them. If we allow ourselves to get out of the box of our own personal position, and reach out to the heart of the story we read, we will give to ourselves and to others a far more enriching experience.

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Sarah Zama wrote her first story when she was nine. Fourteen years ago, when she started her job in a bookshop, she discovered books that address the structure of a story and she became addicted to them. Today, she’s a dieselpunk author who writes fantasy stories historically set in the 1920s. Her life-long interest in Tolkien has turned quite nerdy recently. She writes about all her passions on her blog https://theoldshelter.com/