the ask@AAR: What review did we get utterly wrong?
AAR readers routinely tell us they disagree with our takes on books. Over the years we’ve been told:
and
and
All you wanted was the romance?? Lame. Kim Harrison is soo much more.
and
Terrible review
By a nasty reviewer
Sarcastic probably envious
If your effort
I would have appreciated a non judgements summary so I could
Make my own decision whether it’s valuable or not
Recently, AAR reviewers and readers disagreed with our review of Get A Life Chloe Brown. Personally, I keep meaning to write a second review of Bec McMaster’s Of Silk and Steam because I love it so and we gave it a C-.
What reviews do think we got completely wrong and why?
I’m so glad “Of Silk and Steam” by Bec McMaster was mentioned right off the top. That review has bothered me for years. It particularly rankled because it was the only review of her work here for quite some time and I felt like readers didn’t get a very accurate view of her series. Happily that has changed and her books are reviewed quite often now. I would also quibble a bit with a B+ for “Kiss of Steel” as it’s an A read for me and does an amazing job of setting up the whole world- but that’s just nitpicking on my part as the review itself is great.
Reviews I absolutely don’t agree with? Probably any of old Judith McNaught books. Even “back in the day” I couldn’t stomach her heroes and thought they were jerks (it’s not just me being a revisionist now that times have changed). But many people would disagree with me as those books used to always make the top 100 readers polls here.
I disagreed so strongly with our A review of Texas Destiny (which was also selected by NPR as a top romance!) that I wrote my own C- review. The comments are gone now because they were on a previous web site iteration, but I got a lot of flak for my complaint that I couldn’t feel sorry for a “rich girl who lost everything” heroine when “everything” was a plantation full of human beings and the author never mentioned the word slavery in the book. I was told I was ruining the fantasy.
I had other complaints about the book, too, especially about dated language and a vintage sweet, perfect heroine, but the poor-little-Confederate/black erasure (and the comments I got for calling it out) stuck with me.
A review: https://allaboutromance.com/book-review/texas-destiny-by-lorraine-heath/
C- review: https://allaboutromance.com/book-review/texas-destiny-2-by-lorraine-heath/
Oh, I remember that debate very well and was dismayed by reader comments who felt your review ruined their fantasy of the unfortunate white heroine who loses her slave plantation. Good grief!
Terrific ask@AAR!!! Katja’s comment pretty much summarised my own view on this issue. “I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it” a quote more or less attributed to Evelyn Beatrice Hall referring to Voltaire in 1906. And that quote is relevant today despite the non-platforming, alleged “hurt feelings” from the so-called snowflakes, trigger warning, etc. Free speech is important to me and so every review I read on this site and others I appreciate even if I can’t get my head round the reviewer’s opinion or grading. I relish the D and F reviews (thank you, especially, Lisa!!!) most of all because I know how hard it is to disparage rather than flatter. I posted nearly 300 reviews over nearly 20 years on Amazon (nearly all in the romance genres) but gave up in the end. I never minded the critical comments or the “not helpful” votes at all. What made me stop was the fact that the fan girls became like twitter abusers who are vocal without being versed – please let’s have sensible discussion and not express opinion without any knowledge or discernment – sometimes I suspect they hadn’t even read the book! And the ARC brigade who I think must often feel obliged to be nice when the book turns out to be rubbish – they just irritate me beyond belief. Long may you reign, AAR – you provide our community with a tremendous service and a safe place to rant, rave and learn.
“Vocal without being versed.” Oh, that applies to so many things these days! And, unfortunately, it seems the least versed are the most vocal. As W.B Years put it, “The best lack all conviction/While the worst are full of a passionate intensity.”
Yeats!
/stupid autocorrect
Sadly, The Second Coming has become even more accurate over time.
One of my favorite bits of poetry. Unfortunately, it’s been apt for far too long.’
Beautifully said! This is one reason I don’t really enjoy Goodreads. So many of the “reviews” are flashing pictures and 100 sentences of “OMG!! Followed by X number of reasons why the hero is soooooo hot.
I think the hardest review to write are the ones where the author you love missed the mark somehow. I also have a problem grading books by a favorite author. If they are not as good as their older “A” books but they are head and shoulders above other authors’ books how do I grade them? Are they on their own scale? If Joanna Bourne’s latest isn’t as good as a previous one of hers but it’s still better than anything else I read that year what’s the right grade? All B+ books should be equal right?
You are so right about Goodreads “reviews.” Out of curiosity, I looked up my own erotica short stories to see if Goodreads lists that kind of stuff. To my surprise, not only were most of my titles listed, but one of my more slapdash works got a 5 star rating. It makes me wonder, am I getting good marks for literary quality or because I did a good job giving someone a jolly? (Not that I have a problem either way…) Plus, if you look at erotica readers’ accounts, you’ll notice they have close to 20,000 “books” in their “read” category. Make of that what you will. And here I thought romance readers zipped through books. (Although in all fairness, most erotica “books” are under 5,000 words.)
So yeah, Goodreads can be interesting. But its ratings should be regarded with a grain of salt.
I may not have agreed with your reviews but I have always appreciated them. I don’t believe this to be an issue, where we all have to consensus on a review or a rating but more of an issue of trust. I trust your reviews to help me make a good choice.
Underrated: Anne Stuart’s sexy and smart Ice series–The first three are A books.
Overrated: Linda Howard’s Dream Man. The hero is an ass and the heroine is a drip.
Should have been an A: Sarah Bird’s Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen
Should have been an F: King’s Ransom by Jackie Ashenden
I firmly stand behind my F on that Sarah Bird book. That was one hell of an ahistorical mess, But I agree that almost anything Linda Howard is not the best.
I can remember a specific time that reading a review on AAR changed by mind on a book I had already read and enjoyed. I used to autobuy Eloisa James, and had read Your Wicked Ways and really liked it ( given it an A grade in my head). AAR’s review quibbled with the way the author wrapped up the external conflict in the novel (not the romance between the leads), and after reading the reviewer’s comments, I could never look at that book the same way again. She was right! Rees (the hero) was off the hook and all the women friends took care of fixing everything for him. I was certainly not angry at the reviewer, but maybe a little wistful that my uncomplicated enjoyment of that particular book was ruined?
Hugs!
I read reviews mainly for the plot outline. Quality of prose and dialogue matters a lot to me; there are plenty of authors who I will never read again for those reasons, no matter what grade a reviewer gives their latest book. I’m absolutely fine with a reviewer loving a book I hate, or vice versa. What I really want to know is which tropes the book contains, the speed at which the romance progresses, etc. Having said that, it really frustrates me that so many romance reviews (here and on other sites) go into the plot in so much detail. Even if the reviewer stops at the half way mark, it’s often too much information for me. I don’t want a blow-by-blow description of events. Leave the reader something to discover for themselves.
I feel like a lot of romance readers want to to know exactly what they’re getting so there can never be any surprises, but I’m more …. broadminded? Adventurous? Lucky enough to have no personal triggers? (Another pet peeve is reviews that veer off into a long analysis of how a particular social issue is depicted in a book, which is often something I really don’t care about either way.) I just want some general info about the plot scenario and the characters, then the reviewer’s thoughts about the book’s strengths and weaknesses. Without so much detail that I figure there’s no point reading the book now since I already know what happens……
This is a real rant, sorry. In a nutshell, for me, a reviewer can’t get their personal opinion wrong, just they way they structure their review!
I too don’t want much plot summarizing, as that is rarely a factor for me when deciding whether to read a book. If there is too much plot summary, I do skip the review and might return to it later if I’ve read the book. A quick one paragraph summary is usually sufficient. Instead, I want to know the reviewer’s overall feelings about whether the romance successfully succeeded in being romantic. I also look for strengths and flaws, and general feelings about the quality of the writing. I don’t mind commentary of any issues in a book, social or otherwise, as long as it is integrated into the reviewer’s overall examination of the book.
Just FYI, we do have a sort of “spoiler rule” here at AAR, which is basically that anything in the book blurb or the first third of the book is fair game, but anything else about the plot should be couched in more general terms, so as to avoid too many specifics. Sometimes, we need to enter spoiler territory in order to fully explain why something doesn’t work, but that happens rarely and is always flagged up in the review.
I edit all the reviews you see here, and always raise a query with a reviewer if they’ve said something that might be spoilery; I actually think that, compared to some of the other major romance review sites, we’re fairly spoiler free!
I don’t have a specific title in mind at the moment, but I do know as someone who grades for a living that anytime there is a deduction or a score that isn’t completely without ambiguity, specific reasons and evidence are required so that the recipient can understand better why and where they lost points. There are a number of reviews regularly posted here that give an A-, for instance, without providing reasons why the books wasn’t a solid A read. Occasionally, there have been books that have B grades without attention to the flaws. Similarly, if a book falls within a D range, what are its redeeming qualities that saved it from earning an F? From time to time I have posted to ask the reviewer, but I think it’s generally a good idea for any reviewer to be aware that grades/scores and writing should be fully in sync.
One of the things I appreciate about your reviews is that they are detailed enough for me to be able to tell whether nor not I’ll like a book. The grade you give isn’t the point. For example, your reviewer gave Jo Beverley’s An Unlikely Countess a C, thinking that the book was too heavy on the history and light on the romance. However, I really like the emphasis on the historical in historical romance and I found the romance quite believable, despite the absence of any full-blown sex scenes. It’s one of my favorites of Beverley’s books.
It’s so true that one person’s catnip is another’s crap. As I’ve said what seems like countless times, I don’t care a whit about title accuracy in romance but others do. So when I see a romance that says accuracy is a problem–and this is true for me for much of historical romance–I ignore that and read the review for things I do care about: plot, character, and steam.
Sorry to ask, but by “steam” do you mean the pacing of the story or sexual explicitness?
Also, what is DIK? I’ll probably facepalm when I figure it out.
Thanks!
Steam, to me, is a believable, passionate connection between leads. I am all about the passion in romance. Not the sex, but the passion.
A DIK is a Desert Island Keeper, it’s a category here at AAR–you can use it in our Power Search, etc…–for books that garnered an A review. (A+, A, or A-)
Thanks for the clarification on both points!
Those are fair and lovely points. I wasn’t looking to have AAR be criticized but rather to have readers tell us they saw a book differently.
That said, I think we at AAR are fine with having people disagree with what we write–that’s one of the reasons we like to do Pandora’s Boxes. It’s fun to put forth and discuss different perspectives.
I agree with everything Katja said and would add this: How about, rather than all of us posting examples of where we think you guys were completely wrong, each AAR reviewer go back and pick a review she wrote that she later felt was completely wrong—and the reasons why she now feels that way. In fact, how about each reviewer pick two reviews: one where she know feels she was too effusive with her praise and one where she feels she was too negative with her comments. Changes in taste, lifestyle, beliefs, ideas, reading the book in a different way, cultural shifts (for example, what “consent” looks like), etc., all of these can result in a reappraisal of a previous book. Anyway, I know that’s a lot to ask of everyone, but I think it might be more interesting than, “You guys really dropped the ball on GET A LIFE, CHLOE BROWN.”
I now see with chagrin my, to me, unfair criticism of Julie Anne Long’s How the Marquess Was Won. It is a book, despite my claiming I’d never reread it, I’ve read more than once. And it seems very petty of me to downgrade a book because it doesn’t tell the story I want it to–in this case I was dying to have her resolve Lyon and Olivia. Were I to write the review again, I’d give the book a higher grade and discuss it on its own merits.
I have for years marveled at the confidence with which I declared One Night is Never Enough to be a perfect book. I have since read many a love story I think is better. I’d still have given the book a DIK but, in hindsight, I’d never make that claim!
Dabney—I admire how quickly you were able to come up with your examples. There are a number of books I’ve changed my mind about over time—usually going from initially loving a book to merely liking it upon a reread. I think this “love-to-like” pattern is more frequent for me because I rarely go back and reread a book I didn’t like or was lukewarm about the first time around. There are just too many other books out there for me to spend precious reading time on a book I didn’t like much in the first place. One big exception for me was Anne Calhoun. For whatever reason, my reaction was “Meh” the first time I tried her books. I’m so glad I tried her again—she became one of my reliable favorites. As an aside, I really hope she’s ok—and I wish she were still publishing.
There are two things I always try to keep in mind when reading books or reviews of books. The first applies to rereading: You never read the same book twice because you’re always a different person the next time you pick up the book. The second applies to reading reviews: No two people ever read the same book; each of us brings our own individual history, life, culture, beliefs, quirks, etc., to the reading process. What works for one reader, may not work for me, and vice-versa.
Ok—I better stop before I hijack the thread.
I think this was a really human reaction to disappointed expectations. One of my favorite episodes of the Office is “The Injury” where Michael grills his foot- but I was shocked to hear Mindy Kaling (who wrote the episode) say that people were unhappy or disappointed at the time because they were expecting an episode that advanced the Jim/Pam storyline. Over time it has been recognized as one of the best and a fan favorite but at the time people were expecting one thing and got something else. Even though what they got was great they weren’t in the same mindset to appreciate it,
It’s really nice to hear your take on it and I appreciate how genuine you always are and your ability to self evaluate. We are all only human.
Thanks. I am from a big family and am used to being wrong!
A review is always a personal opinion. So as long as the reviewer gives reasons and or examples for why he or she liked or disliked a certain book and takes care to get the facts right, I do not think it is possible to get a review wrong. I may not agree with a review, but that makes neither the review nor me wrong. It is a matter if different opinions and we are all entitled to those.
And as for the argument, that a bad review will make tbe author feel horrible. Yes, that might happen. But reviews are not eulogies or laudatory speeches and they should’t have to be.
Well said. And a “bad” review can actually help an author. For example, if a reviewer says, “This book is a silly romp without enough substance to hold my attention,” a reader might think, “Gee. A silly romp is just what I’m looking for! One-click buy!” Likewise, a “good” review can turn off readers as well. If a reviewer says, “I loved how realistic the sex scenes were and how they didn’t invoke old-fashioned purple prose,” a reader might think, “Oh, well I actually prefer euphemistic sex scenes to the nitty gritty. I’ll give this one a pass.”