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Demystifying Book Review Writing Services: How Do They Work?

Table of contents, definition and scope, target audience, service request and submission, book selection and assignment, reviewer expertise, reviewing the book.

In today’s digital landscape, where books abound and literary works reach a global audience at the click of a button, the need for credible and compelling book reviews has never been more critical. As authors and publishers strive to capture the attention of discerning readers, the role of a reliable book review writing service has emerged as a guiding beacon in this vast sea of literary exploration.

The art of reviewing a book extends far beyond merely summarizing its contents. A well-crafted book review delves deep into the nuances of the plot, characters, writing style, and overall impact of the work, providing potential readers with valuable insights and aiding authors in honing their craft. However, amidst the plethora of review platforms and varying opinions, it can be challenging for authors and publishers to find an avenue that offers both professionalism and objectivity.

Understanding Book Review Writing Services

To grasp the essence of book review writing services, it’s essential to delve into their definition and the scope of services they offer. These specialized services go beyond the traditional book review platforms often found on retail websites or social media. Book review writing services are dedicated entities that cater to the specific needs of authors, publishers, and even self-published writers seeking professional and in-depth reviews.

These services provide a structured and well-analyzed assessment of a book’s merits, strengths, and weaknesses, presenting a balanced evaluation to potential readers. Unlike casual reviews, the ones produced by such services are thorough, reflecting the expertise of qualified book reviewers who scrutinize various aspects of the work, such as literary quality, character development, and overall coherence.

The target audience of book review writing services includes a diverse range of individuals and entities within the literary ecosystem. Authors, whether established or emerging, often turn to these services to gain valuable feedback on their creations and to build credibility and recognition. Traditional publishers leverage these services to secure unbiased opinions that can influence a book’s success in a competitive market.

Additionally, independent and self-published authors find immense value in book review writing services as they lack the support of established publishing houses. Such reviews can help them gain visibility, foster reader trust, and ultimately increase book sales. In essence, these services act as a bridge connecting literary talent with an eager audience, guiding readers toward their next literary adventure and facilitating authors’ journeys towards literary excellence.

The Process of Book Review Writing Services

Understanding how book review writing services operate is crucial to appreciate the effort and expertise that goes into crafting thoughtful and insightful reviews. This section delves into the step-by-step process that these services follow, from the initial service request to the final delivery of the review.

The process typically begins when an author or publisher submits a service request to a book review writing service. Depending on the platform or service provider, the submission may involve filling out a form, providing essential details about the book, the preferred review format, and any specific requirements or deadlines.

Once the request is received, the service provider assesses the book’s genre, target audience, and compatibility with their pool of reviewers. Based on these factors, the book is assigned to a suitable reviewer with expertise in the relevant genre or subject matter. This step is crucial to ensure that the reviewer possesses the necessary knowledge and background to provide a comprehensive evaluation.

One of the hallmarks of reputable book review writing services is the caliber of their reviewers. These professionals often have backgrounds in literature, creative writing, or related fields, and some may be published authors or industry experts themselves. Their experience and knowledge contribute to the credibility and value of the reviews they produce.

The assigned reviewer embarks on reading the book attentively, taking notes on various aspects such as plot development, character arcs, writing style, and thematic elements. During this process, they aim to grasp the author’s intentions, assess the work’s coherence, and identify its unique strengths and weaknesses.

In conclusion, book review writing services play a pivotal role in the modern literary landscape by offering authors, publishers, and self-published writers a professional and unbiased evaluation of their works. These services follow a structured process, engaging qualified reviewers to provide insightful and well-crafted reviews. By facilitating transparent communication, ensuring objectivity, and upholding ethical standards, these services bridge the gap between writers and readers, fostering credibility, visibility, and literary excellence in an increasingly competitive market.

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How to Write A Book Review: Definition, Structure, Examples

July 2, 2023

Understanding the purpose of a book review, telling possible readers, providing constructive feedback, building a community of readers, increasing visibility, the structure of a book review, introduction, summary of the book, critical analysis, style of writing, plot and structure, messages and main ideas, difference and effect, examples and supporting evidence, examples of well-written book reviews, example 1: non-fiction book review, example 2: fiction book review, to kill a mockingbird by harper lee, essential elements, strategy and detailed insights.

Every writer must know to write a book review. It is an important skill for people who love to read and want to become writers. Not only does it help writers, but it also helps other users choose what to read.

It’s important to know why you write a book review before you get started on the actual process of doing so. A book review is important for many reasons, such as:

A well-written review summarizes the book, its main ideas, and what the reader should take from it. This helps potential readers decide if they want to read the book.

Reviews help writers figure out what worked and what didn’t in their book by telling them what worked and what didn’t. Helpful critiques can help writers improve their writing skills and improve their next works.

Book reviews help readers talk about what they’ve read, which builds a sense of community and shared experiences. American Author House help people talk about books and see them from different points of view.

Good reviews can greatly affect how well-known and sold a book is. They change how online sites work and help get the author’s work in front of more people.

Now that we know how important book reviews are, let’s look at how they are put together and what they should include.

The opening should immediately grab the reader’s attention and set the stage for your review. Most of the time, writing a book review has the following parts:

Information about the book: Give the title, author’s name, release date, and subject as your first information. This helps people know which book you are talking about.
Hook: Engage your readers with a catchy line that shows what the book is about or what makes it special. This could be a question that makes you think, an interesting quote, or a short story.
Thesis Statement: Give a short and convincing summary of your feelings about the book. This gives the rest of your review a sense of direction.

Give a summary of the book’s plot, major ideas, and main characters in this part. Don’t give away details that could ruin the story for the reader. Focus on giving people a general idea of the book and how it feels.

The critical analysis is the heart of your book review, where you provide your thoughts and opinions. Think about how to write a book review. Read some of the following tips:

Evaluate the author’s writing style, including how they use words, pace, and tell a story. Talk about how well it tells the story and keeps the reader interested.

Look at how the story goes and how the book is put together. Comment on how well the story makes sense, moves along, and flows. Talk about whether the story keeps readers interested and whether the framework makes it easier to follow.

Analyze the major characters, how they change, and how they are important to the story. Talk about their good points, bad points, and general trustworthiness. Talk about the connections between the characters and how they affect the story.

Check out the book’s core ideas, messages, or social comments. Talk about how well the author handles these topics and if they make sense to the reader.

Think about how original the book is and how it affects the reader. Talk about whether the story shows something new or gives you new ideas. Then write a book review. Discuss how the book made you feel, what it taught you, and how it changed your morals.

Give specific examples and quotes from the book to back up your reasoning. These examples should back your arguments and help readers understand your view. Choose parts that are especially moving, well-written, or show how good the book is.

You can write a book review and conclude by combining your general opinion and summarizing your main points. Give a final suggestion to the people based on what you’ve learned. Use this part to leave a strong impact and get people interested in reading the rest of the book.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg If you want to explore more examples of well-written book reviews and gain inspiration, you can check out our article on The Pros and Cons of Self-Publishing on Amazon .

In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg explores the science behind habits and their impact on our lives. Using real-life examples and engaging anecdotes, Duhigg provides a fascinating look into how habits are formed, how they can be changed, and their influence on personal and professional success.

Duhigg’s writing style is informative and engaging, making complex concepts accessible to many readers. His meticulous research is evident throughout the book, as he presents compelling case studies and scientific findings to support his claims. The book’s structure seamlessly guides readers through exploring habit formation, change, and its applications in various domains.

By dissecting the underlying psychology of habits, Duhigg sheds light on the power of routine and the potential for personal transformation. The book offers actionable insights and practical strategies to help readers harness the power of habits in their own lives.

The Power of Habit is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the influence of habits on personal and professional development. Duhigg’s compelling storytelling and evidence-based approach make this book a valuable resource for individuals seeking to make positive life changes.

Summary: To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic novel set in the racially-charged atmosphere of the 1930s Deep South. Harper Lee’s timeless masterpiece explores themes of racial inequality, justice, and the loss of innocence through the eyes of Scout Finch, a young girl growing up in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama.

Lee’s evocative writing transports readers to a bygone era, vividly depicting the social complexities and prejudices of the time. Through Scout’s innocent perspective, the reader witnesses the profound impact of racism and intolerance on the community. The memorable characters, such as Atticus Finch and Boo Radley, are flawlessly developed, each contributing to the overarching narrative with depth and nuance.

The novel’s exploration of moral courage, empathy, and the pursuit of justice resonates as powerfully today as it did upon its publication. Lee’s ability to tackle sensitive subjects with sensitivity and authenticity sets To Kill a Mockingbird apart as a timeless work of literature.

Conclusion:

To Kill a Mockingbird is a literary masterpiece that confronts the complexities of racial injustice with grace and insight. Harper Lee’s remarkable storytelling and profound themes. If you’re interested in exploring more classic literature and book reviews, you can find valuable insights in our article about Fantastic Fiction: Discovering the Best Fantasy and Sci-Fi Books .

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How to Write a Book Review: A Comprehensive Tutorial With Examples

You don’t need to be a literary expert to craft captivating book reviews. With one in every three readers selecting books based on insightful reviews, your opinions can guide fellow bibliophiles toward their next literary adventure.

Learning how to write a book review will not only help you excel at your assigned tasks, but you’ll also contribute valuable insights to the book-loving community and turn your passion into a professional pursuit.

In this comprehensive guide, PaperPerk will walk you through a few simple steps to master the art of writing book reviews so you can confidently embark on this rewarding journey.

What is a Book Review?

A book review is a critical evaluation of a book, offering insights into its content, quality, and impact. It helps readers make informed decisions about whether to read the book.

Writing a book review as an assignment benefits students in multiple ways. Firstly, it teaches them how to write a book review by developing their analytical skills as they evaluate the content, themes, and writing style .

Secondly, it enhances their ability to express opinions and provide constructive criticism. Additionally, book review assignments expose students to various publications and genres, broadening their knowledge.

Furthermore, these tasks foster essential skills for academic success, like critical thinking and the ability to synthesize information. By now, we’re sure you want to learn how to write a book review, so let’s look at the book review template first.

Table of Contents

Book Review Template

How to write a book review- a step by step guide.

Check out these 5 straightforward steps for composing the best book review.

Step 1: Planning Your Book Review – The Art of Getting Started

You’ve decided to take the plunge and share your thoughts on a book that has captivated (or perhaps disappointed) you. Before you start book reviewing, let’s take a step back and plan your approach. Since knowing how to write a book review that’s both informative and engaging is an art in itself.

Choosing Your Literature

First things first, pick the book you want to review. This might seem like a no-brainer, but selecting a book that genuinely interests you will make the review process more enjoyable and your insights more authentic.

Crafting the Master Plan

Next, create an outline that covers all the essential points you want to discuss in your review. This will serve as the roadmap for your writing journey.

The Devil is in the Details

As you read, note any information that stands out, whether it overwhelms, underwhelms, or simply intrigues you. Pay attention to:

The characters and their development
The plot and its intricacies
Any themes, symbols, or motifs you find noteworthy

Remember to reserve a body paragraph for each point you want to discuss.

The Key Questions to Ponder

When planning your book review, consider the following questions:

What’s the plot (if any)? Understanding the driving force behind the book will help you craft a more effective review.
Is the plot interesting? Did the book hold your attention and keep you turning the pages?
Are the writing techniques effective? Does the author’s style captivate you, making you want to read (or reread) the text?
Are the characters or the information believable? Do the characters/plot/information feel real, and can you relate to them?
Would you recommend the book to anyone? Consider if the book is worthy of being recommended, whether to impress someone or to support a point in a literature class.
What could improve? Always keep an eye out for areas that could be improved. Providing constructive criticism can enhance the quality of literature.

Step 2 – Crafting the Perfect Introduction to Write a Book Review

In this second step of “how to write a book review,” we’re focusing on the art of creating a powerful opening that will hook your audience and set the stage for your analysis.

Identify Your Book and Author

Begin by mentioning the book you’ve chosen, including its title and the author’s name. This informs your readers and establishes the subject of your review.

Ponder the Title

Next, discuss the mental images or emotions the book’s title evokes in your mind . This helps your readers understand your initial feelings and expectations before diving into the book.

Judge the Book by Its Cover (Just a Little)

Take a moment to talk about the book’s cover. Did it intrigue you? Did it hint at what to expect from the story or the author’s writing style? Sharing your thoughts on the cover can offer a unique perspective on how the book presents itself to potential readers.

Present Your Thesis

Now it’s time to introduce your thesis. This statement should be a concise and insightful summary of your opinion of the book. For example:

“Normal People” by Sally Rooney is a captivating portrayal of the complexities of human relationships, exploring themes of love, class, and self-discovery with exceptional depth and authenticity.

Ensure that your thesis is relevant to the points or quotes you plan to discuss throughout your review.

Incorporating these elements into your introduction will create a strong foundation for your book review. Your readers will be eager to learn more about your thoughts and insights on the book, setting the stage for a compelling and thought-provoking analysis.

How to Write a Book Review: Step 3 – Building Brilliant Body Paragraphs

You’ve planned your review and written an attention-grabbing introduction. Now it’s time for the main event: crafting the body paragraphs of your book review. In this step of “how to write a book review,” we’ll explore the art of constructing engaging and insightful body paragraphs that will keep your readers hooked.

Summarize Without Spoilers

Begin by summarizing a specific section of the book, not revealing any major plot twists or spoilers. Your goal is to give your readers a taste of the story without ruining surprises.

Support Your Viewpoint with Quotes

Next, choose three quotes from the book that support your viewpoint or opinion. These quotes should be relevant to the section you’re summarizing and help illustrate your thoughts on the book.

Analyze the Quotes

Write a summary of each quote in your own words, explaining how it made you feel or what it led you to think about the book or the author’s writing. This analysis should provide insight into your perspective and demonstrate your understanding of the text.

Structure Your Body Paragraphs

Dedicate one body paragraph to each quote, ensuring your writing is well-connected, coherent, and easy to understand.

For example:

In Jane Eyre , Charlotte Brontë writes, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me.” This powerful statement highlights Jane’s fierce independence and refusal to be trapped by societal expectations.
In Normal People , Sally Rooney explores the complexities of love and friendship when she writes, “It was culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys.” This quote reveals the author’s astute observations on the role of culture and class in shaping personal relationships.
In Wuthering Heights , Emily Brontë captures the tumultuous nature of love with the quote, “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” This poignant line emphasizes the deep, unbreakable bond between the story’s central characters.

By following these guidelines, you’ll create body paragraphs that are both captivating and insightful, enhancing your book review and providing your readers with a deeper understanding of the literary work.

How to Write a Book Review: Step 4 – Crafting a Captivating Conclusion

You’ve navigated through planning, introductions, and body paragraphs with finesse. Now it’s time to wrap up your book review with a conclusion that leaves a lasting impression . In this final step of “how to write a book review,” we’ll explore the art of writing a memorable and persuasive conclusion.

Summarize Your Analysis

Begin by summarizing the key points you’ve presented in the body paragraphs. This helps to remind your readers of the insights and arguments you’ve shared throughout your review.

Offer Your Final Conclusion

Next, provide a conclusion that reflects your overall feelings about the book. This is your chance to leave a lasting impression and persuade your readers to consider your perspective.

Address the Book’s Appeal

Now, answer the question: Is this book worth reading? Be clear about who would enjoy the book and who might not. Discuss the taste preferences and circumstances that make the book more appealing to some readers than others.

For example: The Alchemist is a book that can enchant a young teen, but those who are already well-versed in classic literature might find it less engaging.

Be Subtle and Balanced

Avoid simply stating whether you “liked” or “disliked” the book. Instead, use nuanced language to convey your message. Highlight the pros and cons of reading the type of literature you’ve reviewed, offering a balanced perspective.

Bringing It All Together

By following these guidelines, you’ll craft a conclusion that leaves your readers with a clear understanding of your thoughts and opinions on the book. Your review will be a valuable resource for those considering whether to pick up the book, and your witty and insightful analysis will make your review a pleasure to read. So conquer the world of book reviews, one captivating conclusion at a time!

How to Write a Book Review: Step 5 – Rating the Book (Optional)

You’ve masterfully crafted your book review, from the introduction to the conclusion. But wait, there’s one more step you might consider before calling it a day: rating the book. In this optional step of “how to write a book review,” we’ll explore the benefits and methods of assigning a rating to the book you’ve reviewed.

Why Rate the Book?

Sometimes, when writing a professional book review, it may not be appropriate to state whether you liked or disliked the book. In such cases, assigning a rating can be an effective way to get your message across without explicitly sharing your personal opinion.

How to Rate the Book

There are various rating systems you can use to evaluate the book, such as:

A star rating (e.g., 1 to 5 stars)
A numerical score (e.g., 1 to 10)
A letter grade (e.g., A+ to F)

Choose a rating system that best suits your style and the format of your review. Be consistent in your rating criteria, considering writing quality, character development, plot, and overall enjoyment.

Tips for Rating the Book

Here are some tips for rating the book effectively:

Be honest: Your rating should reflect your true feelings about the book. Don’t inflate or deflate your rating based on external factors, such as the book’s popularity or the author’s reputation.
Be fair:Consider the book’s merits and shortcomings when rating. Even if you didn’t enjoy the book, recognize its strengths and acknowledge them in your rating.
Be clear: Explain the rationale behind your rating so your readers understand the factors that influenced your evaluation.

Wrapping Up

By including a rating in your book review, you provide your readers with an additional insight into your thoughts on the book. While this step is optional, it can be a valuable tool for conveying your message subtly yet effectively. So, rate those books confidently, adding a touch of wit and wisdom to your book reviews.

Additional Tips on How to Write a Book Review: A Guide

In this segment, we’ll explore additional tips on how to write a book review. Get ready to captivate your readers and make your review a memorable one!

Hook ’em with an Intriguing Introduction

Keep your introduction precise and to the point. Readers have the attention span of a goldfish these days, so don’t let them swim away in boredom. Start with a bang and keep them hooked!

Embrace the World of Fiction

When learning how to write a book review, remember that reviewing fiction is often more engaging and effective. If your professor hasn’t assigned you a specific book, dive into the realm of fiction and select a novel that piques your interest.

Opinionated with Gusto

Don’t shy away from adding your own opinion to your review. A good book review always features the writer’s viewpoint and constructive criticism. After all, your readers want to know what you think!

Express Your Love (or Lack Thereof)

If you adored the book, let your readers know! Use phrases like “I’ll definitely return to this book again” to convey your enthusiasm. Conversely, be honest but respectful even if the book wasn’t your cup of tea.

Templates and Examples and Expert Help: Your Trusty Sidekicks

Feeling lost? You can always get help from formats, book review examples or online college paper writing service platforms. These trusty sidekicks will help you navigate the world of book reviews with ease.

Be a Champion for New Writers and Literature

Remember to uplift new writers and pieces of literature. If you want to suggest improvements, do so kindly and constructively. There’s no need to be mean about anyone’s books – we’re all in this literary adventure together!

Criticize with Clarity, Not Cruelty

When adding criticism to your review, be clear but not mean. Remember, there’s a fine line between constructive criticism and cruelty. Tread lightly and keep your reader’s feelings in mind.

Avoid the Comparison Trap

Resist the urge to compare one writer’s book with another. Every book holds its worth, and comparing them will only confuse your reader. Stick to discussing the book at hand, and let it shine in its own light.

Top 7 Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Writing a book review can be a delightful and rewarding experience, especially when you balance analysis, wit, and personal insights. However, some common mistakes can kill the brilliance of your review.

In this section of “how to write a book review,” we’ll explore the top 7 blunders writers commit and how to steer clear of them, with a dash of modernist literature examples and tips for students writing book reviews as assignments.

Succumbing to the Lure of Plot Summaries

Mistake: Diving headfirst into a plot summary instead of dissecting the book’s themes, characters, and writing style.

Example: “The Bell Jar chronicles the life of a young woman who experiences a mental breakdown.”

How to Avoid: Delve into the book’s deeper aspects, such as its portrayal of mental health, societal expectations, and the author’s distinctive narrative voice. Offer thoughtful insights and reflections, making your review a treasure trove of analysis.

Unleashing the Spoiler Kraken

Mistake: Spilling major plot twists or the ending without providing a spoiler warning, effectively ruining the reading experience for potential readers.

Example: “In Metamorphosis, the protagonist’s transformation into a monstrous insect leads to…”

How to Avoid: Tread carefully when discussing significant plot developments, and consider using spoiler warnings. Focus on the impact of these plot points on the overall narrative, character growth, or thematic resonance.

Riding the Personal Bias Express

Mistake: Allowing personal bias to hijack the review without providing sufficient evidence or reasoning to support opinions.

Example: “I detest books about existential crises, so The Sun Also Rises was a snoozefest.”

How to Avoid: While personal opinions are valid, it’s crucial to back them up with specific examples from the book. Discuss aspects like writing style, character development, or pacing to support your evaluation and provide a more balanced perspective.

Wielding the Vague Language Saber

Mistake: Resorting to generic, vague language that fails to capture the nuances of the book and can come across as clichéd.

Example: “This book was mind-blowing. It’s a must-read for everyone.”

How to Avoid: Use precise and descriptive language to express your thoughts. Employ specific examples and quotations to highlight memorable scenes, the author’s unique writing style, or the impact of the book’s themes on readers.

Ignoring the Contextualization Compass

Mistake: Neglecting to provide context about the author, genre, or cultural relevance of the book, leaving readers without a proper frame of reference.

Example: “This book is dull and unoriginal.”

How to Avoid: Offer readers a broader understanding by discussing the author’s background, the genre conventions the book adheres to or subverts, and any societal or historical contexts that inform the narrative. This helps readers appreciate the book’s uniqueness and relevance.

Overindulging in Personal Preferences

Mistake: Letting personal preferences overshadow an objective assessment of the book’s merits.

Example: “I don’t like stream-of-consciousness writing, so this book is automatically bad.”

How to Avoid: Acknowledge personal preferences but strive to evaluate the book objectively. Focus on the book’s strengths and weaknesses, considering how well it achieves its goals within its genre or intended audience.

Forgetting the Target Audience Telescope

Mistake: Failing to mention the book’s target audience or who might enjoy it, leading to confusion for potential readers.

Example: “This book is great for everyone.”

How to Avoid: Contemplate the book’s intended audience, genre, and themes. Mention who might particularly enjoy the book based on these factors, whether it’s fans of a specific genre, readers interested in character-driven stories, or those seeking thought-provoking narratives.

By dodging these common pitfalls, writers can craft insightful, balanced, and engaging book reviews that help readers make informed decisions about their reading choices.

These tips are particularly beneficial for students writing book reviews as assignments, as they ensure a well-rounded and thoughtful analysis.!

Many students requested us to cover how to write a book review. This thorough guide is sure to help you. At Paperperk, professionals are dedicated to helping students find their balance. We understand the importance of good grades, so we offer the finest writing service , ensuring students stay ahead of the curve. So seek expert help because only Paperperk is your perfect solution!

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How to Write a Book Review: Awesome Guide

A book review allows students to illustrate the author's intentions of writing the piece, as well as create a criticism of the book — as a whole. In other words, form an opinion of the author's presented ideas. Check out this guide from EssayPro — book review writing service to learn how to write a book review successfully.

What Is a Book Review?

You may prosper, “what is a book review?”. Book reviews are commonly assigned students to allow them to show a clear understanding of the novel. And to check if the students have actually read the book. The essay format is highly important for your consideration, take a look at the book review format below.

Book reviews are assigned to allow students to present their own opinion regarding the author’s ideas included in the book or passage. They are a form of literary criticism that analyzes the author’s ideas, writing techniques, and quality. A book analysis is entirely opinion-based, in relevance to the book. They are good practice for those who wish to become editors, due to the fact, editing requires a lot of criticism.

Book Review Template

The book review format includes an introduction, body, and conclusion.

Introduction
Describe the book cover and title.
Include any subtitles at this stage.
Include the Author’s Name.
Write a brief description of the novel.
Briefly introduce the main points of the body in your book review.
Avoid mentioning any opinions at this time.
Use about 3 quotations from the author’s novel.
Summarize the quotations in your own words.
Mention your own point-of-view of the quotation.
Remember to keep every point included in its own paragraph.
In brief, summarize the quotations.
In brief, summarize the explanations.
Finish with a concluding sentence.
This can include your final opinion of the book.
Star-Rating (Optional).

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How to Write a Book Review: Step-By-Step

Writing a book review is something that can be done with every novel. Book reviews can apply to all novels, no matter the genre. Some genres may be harder than others. On the other hand, the book review format remains the same. Take a look at these step-by-step instructions from our professional writers to learn how to write a book review in-depth.

Step 1: Planning

Create an essay outline which includes all of the main points you wish to summarise in your book analysis. Include information about the characters, details of the plot, and some other important parts of your chosen novel. Reserve a body paragraph for each point you wish to talk about.

Consider these points before writing:

What is the plot of the book? Understanding the plot enables you to write an effective review.
Is the plot gripping? Does the plot make you want to continue reading the novel? Did you enjoy the plot? Does it manage to grab a reader’s attention?
Are the writing techniques used by the author effective? Does the writer imply factors in-between the lines? What are they?
Are the characters believable? Are the characters logical? Does the book make the characters are real while reading?
Would you recommend the book to anyone? The most important thing: would you tell others to read this book? Is it good enough? Is it bad?
What could be better? Keep in mind the quotes that could have been presented better. Criticize the writer.

Step 2: Introduction

Presumably, you have chosen your book. To begin, mention the book title and author’s name. Talk about the cover of the book. Write a thesis statement regarding the fictitious story or non-fictional novel. Which briefly describes the quoted material in the book review.

Step 3: Body

Choose a specific chapter or scenario to summarise. Include about 3 quotes in the body. Create summaries of each quote in your own words. It is also encouraged to include your own point-of-view and the way you interpret the quote. It is highly important to have one quote per paragraph.

Step 4: Conclusion

Write a summary of the summarised quotations and explanations, included in the body paragraphs. After doing so, finish book analysis with a concluding sentence to show the bigger picture of the book. Think to yourself, “Is it worth reading?”, and answer the question in black and white. However, write in-between the lines. Avoid stating “I like/dislike this book.”

Step 5: Rate the Book (Optional)

After writing a book review, you may want to include a rating. Including a star-rating provides further insight into the quality of the book, to your readers. Book reviews with star-ratings can be more effective, compared to those which don’t. Though, this is entirely optional.

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Dive into literary analysis with EssayPro . Our experts can help you craft insightful book reviews that delve deep into the themes, characters, and narratives of your chosen books. Enhance your understanding and appreciation of literature with us.

Writing Tips

Here is the list of tips for the book review:

A long introduction can certainly lower one’s grade: keep the beginning short. Readers don’t like to read the long introduction for any essay style.
It is advisable to write book reviews about fiction: it is not a must. Though, reviewing fiction can be far more effective than writing about a piece of nonfiction
Avoid Comparing: avoid comparing your chosen novel with other books you have previously read. Doing so can be confusing for the reader.
Opinion Matters: including your own point-of-view is something that is often encouraged when writing book reviews.
Refer to Templates: a book review template can help a student get a clearer understanding of the required writing style.
Don’t be Afraid to Criticize: usually, your own opinion isn’t required for academic papers below Ph.D. level. On the other hand, for book reviews, there’s an exception.
Use Positivity: include a fair amount of positive comments and criticism.
Review The Chosen Novel: avoid making things up. Review only what is presented in the chosen book.
Enjoyed the book? If you loved reading the book, state it. Doing so makes your book analysis more personalized.

Writing a book review is something worth thinking about. Professors commonly assign this form of an assignment to students to enable them to express a grasp of a novel. Following the book review format is highly useful for beginners, as well as reading step-by-step instructions. Writing tips is also useful for people who are new to this essay type. If you need a book review or essay, ask our book report writing services ' write paper for me ' and we'll give you a hand asap!

We also recommend that everyone read the article about essay topics . It will help broaden your horizons in writing a book review as well as other papers.

Book Review Examples

Referring to a book review example is highly useful to those who wish to get a clearer understanding of how to review a book. Take a look at our examples written by our professional writers. Click on the button to open the book review examples and feel free to use them as a reference.

Book review

Kenneth Grahame’s ‘The Wind in the Willows’

Kenneth Grahame’s ‘The Wind in the Willows’ is a novel aimed at youngsters. The plot, itself, is not American humor, but that of Great Britain. In terms of sarcasm, and British-related jokes. The novel illustrates a fair mix of the relationships between the human-like animals, and wildlife. The narrative acts as an important milestone in post-Victorian children’s literature.

Book Review

Dr. John’s ‘Pollution’

Dr. John’s ‘Pollution’ consists of 3 major parts. The first part is all about the polluted ocean. The second being about the pollution of the sky. The third part is an in-depth study of how humans can resolve these issues. The book is a piece of non-fiction that focuses on modern-day pollution ordeals faced by both animals and humans on Planet Earth. It also focuses on climate change, being the result of the global pollution ordeal.

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How to Write a Book Review: The Complete Guide

by Sue Weems | 23 comments

If you've ever loved (or hated) a book, you may have been tempted to review it. Here's a complete guide to how to write a book review, so you can share your literary adventures with other readers more often!

How to Write a Book Review: The Complete Guide

You finally reach the last page of a book that kept you up all night and close it with the afterglow of satisfaction and a tinge of regret that it’s over. If you enjoyed the book enough to stay up reading it way past your bedtime, consider writing a review. It is one of the best gifts you can give an author.

Regardless of how much you know about how to write a book review, the author will appreciate hearing how their words touched you.

But as you face the five shaded stars and empty box, a blank mind strikes. What do I say? I mean, is this a book really deserving of five stars? How did it compare to Dostoevsky or Angelou or Dickens?

Maybe there’s an easier way to write a book review.

Want to learn how to write a book from start to finish? Check out How to Write a Book: The Complete Guide .

The Fallacy of Book Reviews

Once you’ve decided to give a review, you are faced with the task of deciding how many stars to give a book.

When I first started writing book reviews, I made the mistake of trying to compare a book to ALL BOOKS OF ALL TIME. (Sorry for the all caps, but that’s how it felt, like a James Earl Jones voice was asking me where to put this book in the queue of all books.)

Other readers find themselves comparing new titles to their favorite books. It's a natural comparison. But is it fair?

This is honestly why I didn’t give reviews of books for a long time. How can I compare a modern romance or historical fiction war novel with Dostoevsky? I can’t, and I shouldn’t.

I realized my mistake one day as I was watching (of all things) a dog show. In the final round, they trotted out dogs of all shapes, colors, and sizes. I thought, “How can a Yorkshire Terrier compete with a Basset Hound?” As if he'd read my mind, the announcer explained that each is judged by the standards for its breed.

This was my “Aha!” moment. I have to take a book on its own terms. The question is not, “How does this book compare to all books I’ve read?” but “How well did this book deliver what it promised for the intended audience?”

A review is going to reflect my personal experience with the book, but I can help potential readers by taking a minute to consider what the author intended. Let me explain what I mean.

How to Write a Book Review: Consider a Book’s Promise

A book makes a promise with its cover, blurb, and first pages. It begins to set expectations the minute a reader views the thumbnail or cover. Those things indicate the genre, tone, and likely the major themes.

If a book cover includes a lip-locked couple in flowing linen on a beach, and I open to the first page to read about a pimpled vampire in a trench coat speaking like Mr. Knightly about his plan for revenge on the entire human race, there’s been a breach of contract before I even get to page two. These are the books we put down immediately (unless a mixed-message beachy cover combined with an Austen vampire story is your thing).

But what if the cover, blurb, and first pages are cohesive and perk our interest enough to keep reading? Then we have to think about what the book has promised us, which revolves around one key idea: What is the core story question and how well is it resolved?

Sometimes genre expectations help us answer this question: a romance will end with a couple who finds their way, a murder mystery ends with a solved case, a thriller’s protagonist beats the clock and saves the country or planet.

The stories we love most do those expected things in a fresh or surprising way with characters we root for from the first page. Even (and especially!) when a book doesn’t fit neatly in a genre category, we need to consider what the book promises on those first pages and decide how well it succeeds on the terms it sets for itself.

When I Don’t Know What to Write

About a month ago, I realized I was overthinking how to write a book review. Here at the Write Practice we have a longstanding tradition of giving critiques using the Oreo method : point out something that was a strength, then something we wondered about or that confused us, followed by another positive.

We can use this same structure to write a simple review when we finish books. Consider this book review format:

[Book Title] by [book author] is about ___[plot summary in a sentence—no spoilers!]___. I chose this book based on ________. I really enjoyed ________. I wondered how ___________. Anyone who likes ____ will love this book.

Following this basic template can help you write an honest review about most any book, and it will give the author or publisher good information about what worked (and possibly what didn’t). You might write about the characters, the conflict, the setting, or anything else that captured you and kept you reading.

As an added bonus, you will be a stronger reader when you are able to express why you enjoyed parts of a book (just like when you critique!). After you complete a few, you’ll find it gets easier, and you won’t need the template anymore.

What if I Didn’t Like It?

Like professional book reviewers, you will have to make the call about when to leave a negative review. If I can’t give a book at least three stars, I usually don’t review it. Why? If I don’t like a book after a couple chapters, I put it down. I don’t review anything that I haven’t read the entire book.

Also, it may be that I’m not the target audience. The book might be well-written and well-reviewed with a great cover, and it just doesn’t capture me. Or maybe it's a book that just isn't hitting me right now for reasons that have nothing to do with the book and everything to do with my own reading life and needs. Every book is not meant for every reader.

If a book kept me reading all the way to the end and I didn’t like the ending? I would probably still review it, since there had to be enough good things going on to keep me reading to the end. I might mention in my review that the ending was less satisfying than I hoped, but I would still end with a positive.

How to Write a Book Review: Your Turn

As writers, we know how difficult it is to put down the words day after day. We are typically voracious readers. Let’s send some love back out to our fellow writers this week and review the most recent title we enjoyed.

What was the last book you read or reviewed? Do you ever find it hard to review a book? Share in the comments .

Now it's your turn. Think of the last book you read. Then, take fifteen minutes to write a review of it based on the template above. When you're done, share your review in the Pro Practice Workshop . For bonus points, post it on the book's page on Amazon and Goodreads, too!

Don't forget to leave feedback for your fellow writers! What new reads will you discover in the comments?

Sue Weems is a writer, teacher, and traveler with an advanced degree in (mostly fictional) revenge. When she’s not rationalizing her love for parentheses (and dramatic asides), she follows a sailor around the globe with their four children, two dogs, and an impossibly tall stack of books to read. You can read more of her writing tips on her website .

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Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Assignments

Annotated Bibliography
Analyzing a Scholarly Journal Article
Group Presentations
Dealing with Nervousness
Using Visual Aids
Grading Someone Else's Paper
Types of Structured Group Activities
Group Project Survival Skills
Leading a Class Discussion
Multiple Book Review Essay
Reviewing Collected Works
Writing a Case Analysis Paper
Writing a Case Study
About Informed Consent
Writing Field Notes
Writing a Policy Memo
Writing a Reflective Paper
Writing a Research Proposal
Generative AI and Writing
Acknowledgments

A book review is a thorough description, critical analysis, and/or evaluation of the quality, meaning, and significance of a book, often written in relation to prior research on the topic. Reviews generally range from 500-2000 words, but may be longer or shorter depends on several factors: the length and complexity of the book being reviewed, the overall purpose of the review, and whether the review examines two or more books that focus on the same topic. Professors assign book reviews as practice in carefully analyzing complex scholarly texts and to assess your ability to effectively synthesize research so that you reach an informed perspective about the topic being covered.

There are two general approaches to reviewing a book:

Descriptive review: Presents the content and structure of a book as objectively as possible, describing essential information about a book's purpose and authority. This is done by stating the perceived aims and purposes of the study, often incorporating passages quoted from the text that highlight key elements of the work. Additionally, there may be some indication of the reading level and anticipated audience.
Critical review: Describes and evaluates the book in relation to accepted literary and historical standards and supports this evaluation with evidence from the text and, in most cases, in contrast to and in comparison with the research of others. It should include a statement about what the author has tried to do, evaluates how well you believe the author has succeeded in meeting the objectives of the study, and presents evidence to support this assessment. For most course assignments, your professor will want you to write this type of review.

Book Reviews. Writing Center. University of New Hampshire; Book Reviews: How to Write a Book Review. Writing and Style Guides. Libraries. Dalhousie University; Kindle, Peter A. "Teaching Students to Write Book Reviews." Contemporary Rural Social Work 7 (2015): 135-141; Erwin, R. W. “Reviewing Books for Scholarly Journals.” In Writing and Publishing for Academic Authors . Joseph M. Moxley and Todd Taylor. 2 nd edition. (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 1997), pp. 83-90.

How to Approach Writing Your Review

NOTE: Since most course assignments require that you write a critical rather than descriptive book review, the following information about preparing to write and developing the structure and style of reviews focuses on this approach.

I. Common Features

While book reviews vary in tone, subject, and style, they share some common features. These include:

A review gives the reader a concise summary of the content . This includes a description of the research topic and scope of analysis as well as an overview of the book's overall perspective, argument, and purpose.
A review offers a critical assessment of the content in relation to other studies on the same topic . This involves documenting your reactions to the work under review--what strikes you as noteworthy or important, whether or not the arguments made by the author(s) were effective or persuasive, and how the work enhanced your understanding of the research problem under investigation.
In addition to analyzing a book's strengths and weaknesses, a scholarly review often recommends whether or not readers would value the work for its authenticity and overall quality . This measure of quality includes both the author's ideas and arguments and covers practical issues, such as, readability and language, organization and layout, indexing, and, if needed, the use of non-textual elements .

To maintain your focus, always keep in mind that most assignments ask you to discuss a book's treatment of its topic, not the topic itself . Your key sentences should say, "This book shows...,” "The study demonstrates...," or “The author argues...," rather than "This happened...” or “This is the case....”

II. Developing a Critical Assessment Strategy

There is no definitive methodological approach to writing a book review in the social sciences, although it is necessary that you think critically about the research problem under investigation before you begin to write. Therefore, writing a book review is a three-step process: 1) carefully taking notes as you read the text; 2) developing an argument about the value of the work under consideration; and, 3) clearly articulating that argument as you write an organized and well-supported assessment of the work.

A useful strategy in preparing to write a review is to list a set of questions that should be answered as you read the book [remember to note the page numbers so you can refer back to the text!]. The specific questions to ask yourself will depend upon the type of book you are reviewing. For example, a book that is presenting original research about a topic may require a different set of questions to ask yourself than a work where the author is offering a personal critique of an existing policy or issue.

Here are some sample questions that can help you think critically about the book:

Thesis or Argument . What is the central thesis—or main argument—of the book? If the author wanted you to get one main idea from the book, what would it be? How does it compare or contrast to the world that you know or have experienced? What has the book accomplished? Is the argument clearly stated and does the research support this?
Topic . What exactly is the subject or topic of the book? Is it clearly articulated? Does the author cover the subject adequately? Does the author cover all aspects of the subject in a balanced fashion? Can you detect any biases? What type of approach has the author adopted to explore the research problem [e.g., topical, analytical, chronological, descriptive]?
Evidence . How does the author support their argument? What evidence does the author use to prove their point? Is the evidence based on an appropriate application of the method chosen to gather information? Do you find that evidence convincing? Why or why not? Does any of the author's information [or conclusions] conflict with other books you've read, courses you've taken, or just previous assumptions you had about the research problem?
Structure . How does the author structure their argument? Does it follow a logical order of analysis? What are the parts that make up the whole? Does the argument make sense to you? Does it persuade you? Why or why not?
Take-aways . How has this book helped you understand the research problem? Would you recommend the book to others? Why or why not?

Beyond the content of the book, you may also consider some information about the author and the general presentation of information. Question to ask may include:

The Author: Who is the author? The nationality, political persuasion, education, intellectual interests, personal history, and historical context may provide crucial details about how a work takes shape. Does it matter, for example, that the author is affiliated with a particular organization? What difference would it make if the author participated in the events they wrote about? What other topics has the author written about? Does this work build on prior research or does it represent a new or unique area of research?
The Presentation: What is the book's genre? Out of what discipline does it emerge? Does it conform to or depart from the conventions of its genre? These questions can provide a historical or other contextual standard upon which to base your evaluations. If you are reviewing the first book ever written on the subject, it will be important for your readers to know this. Keep in mind, though, that declarative statements about being the “first,” the "best," or the "only" book of its kind can be a risky unless you're absolutely certain because your professor [presumably] has a much better understanding of the overall research literature.

NOTE: Most critical book reviews examine a topic in relation to prior research. A good strategy for identifying this prior research is to examine sources the author(s) cited in the chapters introducing the research problem and, of course, any review of the literature. However, you should not assume that the author's references to prior research is authoritative or complete. If any works related to the topic have been excluded, your assessment of the book should note this . Be sure to consult with a librarian to ensure that any additional studies are located beyond what has been cited by the author(s).

Book Reviews. Writing@CSU. Colorado State University; Book Reviews. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina; Hartley, James. "Reading and Writing Book Reviews Across the Disciplines." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 57 (July 2006): 1194–1207; Motta-Roth, D. “Discourse Analysis and Academic Book Reviews: A Study of Text and Disciplinary Cultures.” In Genre Studies in English for Academic Purposes . Fortanet Gómez, Inmaculada et al., editors. (Castellò de la Plana: Publicacions de la Universitat Jaume I, 1998), pp. 29-45. Writing a Book Review. The Writing Lab and The OWL. Purdue University; Writing Book Reviews. Writing Tutorial Services, Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. Indiana University; Suárez, Lorena and Ana I. Moreno. “The Rhetorical Structure of Academic Journal Book Reviews: A Cross-linguistic and Cross-disciplinary Approach .” In Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos, María del Carmen Pérez Llantada Auría, Ramón Plo Alastrué, and Claus Peter Neumann. Actas del V Congreso Internacional AELFE/Proceedings of the 5th International AELFE Conference . Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza, 2006.

Structure and Writing Style

I. Bibliographic Information

Bibliographic information refers to the essential elements of a work if you were to cite it in a paper [i.e., author, title, date of publication, etc.]. Provide the essential information about the book using the writing style [e.g., APA, MLA, Chicago] preferred by your professor or used by the discipline of your major . Depending on how your professor wants you to organize your review, the bibliographic information represents the heading of your review. In general, it would look like this:

[Complete title of book. Author or authors. Place of publication. Publisher. Date of publication. Number of pages before first chapter, often in Roman numerals. Total number of pages]. The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History . By Jill Lepore. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. xii, 207 pp.)

Reviewed by [your full name].

II. Scope/Purpose/Content

Begin your review by telling the reader not only the overarching concern of the book in its entirety [the subject area] but also what the author's particular point of view is on that subject [the thesis statement]. If you cannot find an adequate statement in the author's own words or if you find that the thesis statement is not well-developed, then you will have to compose your own introductory thesis statement that does cover all the material. This statement should be no more than one paragraph and must be succinctly stated, accurate, and unbiased.

If you find it difficult to discern the overall aims and objectives of the book [and, be sure to point this out in your review if you determine that this is a deficiency], you may arrive at an understanding of the book's overall purpose by assessing the following:

Scan the table of contents because it can help you understand how the book was organized and will aid in determining the author's main ideas and how they were developed [e.g., chronologically, topically, historically, etc.].
Why did the author write on this subject rather than on some other subject?
From what point of view is the work written?
Was the author trying to give information, to explain something technical, or to convince the reader of a belief’s validity by dramatizing it in action?
What is the general field or genre, and how does the book fit into it? If necessary, review related literature from other books and journal articles to familiarize yourself with the field.
Who is the intended audience?
What is the author's style? Is it formal or informal? You can evaluate the quality of the writing style by noting some of the following standards: coherence, clarity, originality, forcefulness, accurate use of technical words, conciseness, fullness of development, and fluidity [i.e., quality of the narrative flow].
How did the book affect you? Were there any prior assumptions you had about the subject that were changed, abandoned, or reinforced after reading the book? How is the book related to your own personal beliefs or assumptions? What personal experiences have you had related to the subject that affirm or challenge underlying assumptions?
How well has the book achieved the goal(s) set forth in the preface, introduction, and/or foreword?
Would you recommend this book to others? Why or why not?

III. Note the Method

Support your remarks with specific references to text and quotations that help to illustrate the literary method used to state the research problem, describe the research design, and analyze the findings. In general, authors tend to use the following literary methods, exclusively or in combination.

Description : The author depicts scenes and events by giving specific details that appeal to the five senses, or to the reader’s imagination. The description presents background and setting. Its primary purpose is to help the reader realize, through as many details as possible, the way persons, places, and things are situated within the phenomenon being described.
Narration : The author tells the story of a series of events, usually thematically or in chronological order. In general, the emphasis in scholarly books is on narration of the events. Narration tells what has happened and, in some cases, using this method to forecast what could happen in the future. Its primary purpose is to draw the reader into a story and create a contextual framework for understanding the research problem.
Exposition : The author uses explanation and analysis to present a subject or to clarify an idea. Exposition presents the facts about a subject or an issue clearly and as impartially as possible. Its primary purpose is to describe and explain, to document for the historical record an event or phenomenon.
Argument : The author uses techniques of persuasion to establish understanding of a particular truth, often in the form of addressing a research question, or to convince the reader of its falsity. The overall aim is to persuade the reader to believe something and perhaps to act on that belief. Argument takes sides on an issue and aims to convince the reader that the author's position is valid, logical, and/or reasonable.

IV. Critically Evaluate the Contents

Critical comments should form the bulk of your book review . State whether or not you feel the author's treatment of the subject matter is appropriate for the intended audience. Ask yourself:

Has the purpose of the book been achieved?
What contributions does the book make to the field?
Is the treatment of the subject matter objective or at least balanced in describing all sides of a debate?
Are there facts and evidence that have been omitted?
What kinds of data, if any, are used to support the author's thesis statement?
Can the same data be interpreted to explain alternate outcomes?
Is the writing style clear and effective?
Does the book raise important or provocative issues or topics for discussion?
Does the book bring attention to the need for further research?
What has been left out?

Support your evaluation with evidence from the text and, when possible, state the book's quality in relation to other scholarly sources. If relevant, note of the book's format, such as, layout, binding, typography, etc. Are there tables, charts, maps, illustrations, text boxes, photographs, or other non-textual elements? Do they aid in understanding the text? Describing this is particularly important in books that contain a lot of non-textual elements.

NOTE: It is important to carefully distinguish your views from those of the author so as not to confuse your reader. Be clear when you are describing an author's point of view versus expressing your own.

V. Examine the Front Matter and Back Matter

Front matter refers to any content before the first chapter of the book. Back matter refers to any information included after the final chapter of the book . Front matter is most often numbered separately from the rest of the text in lower case Roman numerals [i.e. i - xi ]. Critical commentary about front or back matter is generally only necessary if you believe there is something that diminishes the overall quality of the work [e.g., the indexing is poor] or there is something that is particularly helpful in understanding the book's contents [e.g., foreword places the book in an important context].

Front matter that may be considered for evaluation when reviewing its overall quality:

Table of contents -- is it clear? Is it detailed or general? Does it reflect the true contents of the book? Does it help in understanding a logical sequence of content?
Author biography -- also found as back matter, the biography of author(s) can be useful in determining the authority of the writer and whether the book builds on prior research or represents new research. In scholarly reviews, noting the author's affiliation and prior publications can be a factor in helping the reader determine the overall validity of the work [i.e., are they associated with a research center devoted to studying the problem under investigation].
Foreword -- the purpose of a foreword is to introduce the reader to the author and the content of the book, and to help establish credibility for both. A foreword may not contribute any additional information about the book's subject matter, but rather, serves as a means of validating the book's existence. In these cases, the foreword is often written by a leading scholar or expert who endorses the book's contributions to advancing research about the topic. Later editions of a book sometimes have a new foreword prepended [appearing before an older foreword, if there was one], which may be included to explain how the latest edition differs from previous editions. These are most often written by the author.
Acknowledgements -- scholarly studies in the social sciences often take many years to write, so authors frequently acknowledge the help and support of others in getting their research published. This can be as innocuous as acknowledging the author's family or the publisher. However, an author may acknowledge prominent scholars or subject experts, staff at key research centers, people who curate important archival collections, or organizations that funded the research. In these particular cases, it may be worth noting these sources of support in your review, particularly if the funding organization is biased or its mission is to promote a particular agenda.
Preface -- generally describes the genesis, purpose, limitations, and scope of the book and may include acknowledgments of indebtedness to people who have helped the author complete the study. Is the preface helpful in understanding the study? Does it provide an effective framework for understanding what's to follow?
Chronology -- also may be found as back matter, a chronology is generally included to highlight key events related to the subject of the book. Do the entries contribute to the overall work? Is it detailed or very general?
List of non-textual elements -- a book that contains numerous charts, photographs, maps, tables, etc. will often list these items after the table of contents in the order that they appear in the text. Is this useful?

Back matter that may be considered for evaluation when reviewing its overall quality:

Afterword -- this is a short, reflective piece written by the author that takes the form of a concluding section, final commentary, or closing statement. It is worth mentioning in a review if it contributes information about the purpose of the book, gives a call to action, summarizes key recommendations or next steps, or asks the reader to consider key points made in the book.
Appendix -- is the supplementary material in the appendix or appendices well organized? Do they relate to the contents or appear superfluous? Does it contain any essential information that would have been more appropriately integrated into the text?
Index -- are there separate indexes for names and subjects or one integrated index. Is the indexing thorough and accurate? Are elements used, such as, bold or italic fonts to help identify specific places in the book? Does the index include "see also" references to direct you to related topics?
Glossary of Terms -- are the definitions clearly written? Is the glossary comprehensive or are there key terms missing? Are any terms or concepts mentioned in the text not included that should have been?
Endnotes -- examine any endnotes as you read from chapter to chapter. Do they provide important additional information? Do they clarify or extend points made in the body of the text? Should any notes have been better integrated into the text rather than separated? Do the same if the author uses footnotes.
Bibliography/References/Further Readings -- review any bibliography, list of references to sources, and/or further readings the author may have included. What kinds of sources appear [e.g., primary or secondary, recent or old, scholarly or popular, etc.]? How does the author make use of them? Be sure to note important omissions of sources that you believe should have been utilized, including important digital resources or archival collections.

VI. Summarize and Comment

State your general conclusions briefly and succinctly. Pay particular attention to the author's concluding chapter and/or afterword. Is the summary convincing? List the principal topics, and briefly summarize the author’s ideas about these topics, main points, and conclusions. If appropriate and to help clarify your overall evaluation, use specific references to text and quotations to support your statements. If your thesis has been well argued, the conclusion should follow naturally. It can include a final assessment or simply restate your thesis. Do not introduce new information in the conclusion. If you've compared the book to any other works or used other sources in writing the review, be sure to cite them at the end of your book review in the same writing style as your bibliographic heading of the book.

Book Reviews. Writing@CSU. Colorado State University; Book Reviews. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina; Gastel, Barbara. "Special Books Section: A Strategy for Reviewing Books for Journals." BioScience 41 (October 1991): 635-637; Hartley, James. "Reading and Writing Book Reviews Across the Disciplines." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 57 (July 2006): 1194–1207; Lee, Alexander D., Bart N. Green, Claire D. Johnson, and Julie Nyquist. "How to Write a Scholarly Book Review for Publication in a Peer-reviewed Journal: A Review of the Literature." Journal of Chiropractic Education 24 (2010): 57-69; Nicolaisen, Jeppe. "The Scholarliness of Published Peer Reviews: A Bibliometric Study of Book Reviews in Selected Social Science Fields." Research Evaluation 11 (2002): 129-140;.Procter, Margaret. The Book Review or Article Critique. The Lab Report. University College Writing Centre. University of Toronto; Reading a Book to Review It. The Writer’s Handbook. Writing Center. University of Wisconsin, Madison; Scarnecchia, David L. "Writing Book Reviews for the Journal Of Range Management and Rangelands." Rangeland Ecology and Management 57 (2004): 418-421; Simon, Linda. "The Pleasures of Book Reviewing." Journal of Scholarly Publishing 27 (1996): 240-241; Writing a Book Review. The Writing Lab and The OWL. Purdue University; Writing Book Reviews. Writing Tutorial Services, Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. Indiana University.

Writing Tip

Always Read the Foreword and/or the Preface

If they are included in the front matter, a good place for understanding a book's overall purpose, organization, contributions to further understanding of the research problem, and relationship to other studies is to read the preface and the foreword. The foreword may be written by someone other than the author or editor and can be a person who is famous or who has name recognition within the discipline. A foreword is often included to add credibility to the work.

The preface is usually an introductory essay written by the author or editor. It is intended to describe the book's overall purpose, arrangement, scope, and overall contributions to the literature. When reviewing the book, it can be useful to critically evaluate whether the goals set forth in the foreword and/or preface were actually achieved. At the very least, they can establish a foundation for understanding a study's scope and purpose as well as its significance in contributing new knowledge.

Distinguishing between a Foreword, a Preface, and an Introduction . Book Creation Learning Center. Greenleaf Book Group, 2019.

Locating Book Reviews

There are several databases the USC Libraries subscribes to that include the full-text or citations to book reviews. Short, descriptive reviews can also be found at book-related online sites such as Amazon , although it's not always obvious who has written them and may actually be created by the publisher. The following databases provide comprehensive access to scholarly, full-text book reviews:

ProQuest [1983-present]
Book Review Digest Retrospective [1905-1982]

Some Language for Evaluating Texts

It can be challenging to find the proper vocabulary from which to discuss and evaluate a book. Here is a list of some active verbs for referring to texts and ideas that you might find useful:

account for
demonstrate
distinguish
investigate

Examples of usage

"The evidence indicates that..."
"This work assesses the effect of..."
"The author identifies three key reasons for..."
"This book questions the view that..."
"This work challenges assumptions about...."

Paquot, Magali. Academic Keyword List. Centre for English Corpus Linguistics. Université Catholique de Louvain.

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URL: https://libguides.usc.edu/writingguide/assignments

The Writing Center • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Book Reviews

What this handout is about.

This handout will help you write a book review, a report or essay that offers a critical perspective on a text. It offers a process and suggests some strategies for writing book reviews.

What is a review?

A review is a critical evaluation of a text, event, object, or phenomenon. Reviews can consider books, articles, entire genres or fields of literature, architecture, art, fashion, restaurants, policies, exhibitions, performances, and many other forms. This handout will focus on book reviews. For a similar assignment, see our handout on literature reviews .

Above all, a review makes an argument. The most important element of a review is that it is a commentary, not merely a summary. It allows you to enter into dialogue and discussion with the work’s creator and with other audiences. You can offer agreement or disagreement and identify where you find the work exemplary or deficient in its knowledge, judgments, or organization. You should clearly state your opinion of the work in question, and that statement will probably resemble other types of academic writing, with a thesis statement, supporting body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

Typically, reviews are brief. In newspapers and academic journals, they rarely exceed 1000 words, although you may encounter lengthier assignments and extended commentaries. In either case, reviews need to be succinct. While they vary in tone, subject, and style, they share some common features:

First, a review gives the reader a concise summary of the content. This includes a relevant description of the topic as well as its overall perspective, argument, or purpose.
Second, and more importantly, a review offers a critical assessment of the content. This involves your reactions to the work under review: what strikes you as noteworthy, whether or not it was effective or persuasive, and how it enhanced your understanding of the issues at hand.
Finally, in addition to analyzing the work, a review often suggests whether or not the audience would appreciate it.

Becoming an expert reviewer: three short examples

Reviewing can be a daunting task. Someone has asked for your opinion about something that you may feel unqualified to evaluate. Who are you to criticize Toni Morrison’s new book if you’ve never written a novel yourself, much less won a Nobel Prize? The point is that someone—a professor, a journal editor, peers in a study group—wants to know what you think about a particular work. You may not be (or feel like) an expert, but you need to pretend to be one for your particular audience. Nobody expects you to be the intellectual equal of the work’s creator, but your careful observations can provide you with the raw material to make reasoned judgments. Tactfully voicing agreement and disagreement, praise and criticism, is a valuable, challenging skill, and like many forms of writing, reviews require you to provide concrete evidence for your assertions.

Consider the following brief book review written for a history course on medieval Europe by a student who is fascinated with beer:

Judith Bennett’s Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600, investigates how women used to brew and sell the majority of ale drunk in England. Historically, ale and beer (not milk, wine, or water) were important elements of the English diet. Ale brewing was low-skill and low status labor that was complimentary to women’s domestic responsibilities. In the early fifteenth century, brewers began to make ale with hops, and they called this new drink “beer.” This technique allowed brewers to produce their beverages at a lower cost and to sell it more easily, although women generally stopped brewing once the business became more profitable.

The student describes the subject of the book and provides an accurate summary of its contents. But the reader does not learn some key information expected from a review: the author’s argument, the student’s appraisal of the book and its argument, and whether or not the student would recommend the book. As a critical assessment, a book review should focus on opinions, not facts and details. Summary should be kept to a minimum, and specific details should serve to illustrate arguments.

Now consider a review of the same book written by a slightly more opinionated student:

Judith Bennett’s Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 was a colossal disappointment. I wanted to know about the rituals surrounding drinking in medieval England: the songs, the games, the parties. Bennett provided none of that information. I liked how the book showed ale and beer brewing as an economic activity, but the reader gets lost in the details of prices and wages. I was more interested in the private lives of the women brewsters. The book was divided into eight long chapters, and I can’t imagine why anyone would ever want to read it.

There’s no shortage of judgments in this review! But the student does not display a working knowledge of the book’s argument. The reader has a sense of what the student expected of the book, but no sense of what the author herself set out to prove. Although the student gives several reasons for the negative review, those examples do not clearly relate to each other as part of an overall evaluation—in other words, in support of a specific thesis. This review is indeed an assessment, but not a critical one.

Here is one final review of the same book:

One of feminism’s paradoxes—one that challenges many of its optimistic histories—is how patriarchy remains persistent over time. While Judith Bennett’s Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 recognizes medieval women as historical actors through their ale brewing, it also shows that female agency had its limits with the advent of beer. I had assumed that those limits were religious and political, but Bennett shows how a “patriarchal equilibrium” shut women out of economic life as well. Her analysis of women’s wages in ale and beer production proves that a change in women’s work does not equate to a change in working women’s status. Contemporary feminists and historians alike should read Bennett’s book and think twice when they crack open their next brewsky.

This student’s review avoids the problems of the previous two examples. It combines balanced opinion and concrete example, a critical assessment based on an explicitly stated rationale, and a recommendation to a potential audience. The reader gets a sense of what the book’s author intended to demonstrate. Moreover, the student refers to an argument about feminist history in general that places the book in a specific genre and that reaches out to a general audience. The example of analyzing wages illustrates an argument, the analysis engages significant intellectual debates, and the reasons for the overall positive review are plainly visible. The review offers criteria, opinions, and support with which the reader can agree or disagree.

Developing an assessment: before you write

There is no definitive method to writing a review, although some critical thinking about the work at hand is necessary before you actually begin writing. Thus, writing a review is a two-step process: developing an argument about the work under consideration, and making that argument as you write an organized and well-supported draft. See our handout on argument .

What follows is a series of questions to focus your thinking as you dig into the work at hand. While the questions specifically consider book reviews, you can easily transpose them to an analysis of performances, exhibitions, and other review subjects. Don’t feel obligated to address each of the questions; some will be more relevant than others to the book in question.

What is the thesis—or main argument—of the book? If the author wanted you to get one idea from the book, what would it be? How does it compare or contrast to the world you know? What has the book accomplished?
What exactly is the subject or topic of the book? Does the author cover the subject adequately? Does the author cover all aspects of the subject in a balanced fashion? What is the approach to the subject (topical, analytical, chronological, descriptive)?
How does the author support their argument? What evidence do they use to prove their point? Do you find that evidence convincing? Why or why not? Does any of the author’s information (or conclusions) conflict with other books you’ve read, courses you’ve taken or just previous assumptions you had of the subject?
How does the author structure their argument? What are the parts that make up the whole? Does the argument make sense? Does it persuade you? Why or why not?
How has this book helped you understand the subject? Would you recommend the book to your reader?

Beyond the internal workings of the book, you may also consider some information about the author and the circumstances of the text’s production:

Who is the author? Nationality, political persuasion, training, intellectual interests, personal history, and historical context may provide crucial details about how a work takes shape. Does it matter, for example, that the biographer was the subject’s best friend? What difference would it make if the author participated in the events they write about?
What is the book’s genre? Out of what field does it emerge? Does it conform to or depart from the conventions of its genre? These questions can provide a historical or literary standard on which to base your evaluations. If you are reviewing the first book ever written on the subject, it will be important for your readers to know. Keep in mind, though, that naming “firsts”—alongside naming “bests” and “onlys”—can be a risky business unless you’re absolutely certain.

Writing the review

Once you have made your observations and assessments of the work under review, carefully survey your notes and attempt to unify your impressions into a statement that will describe the purpose or thesis of your review. Check out our handout on thesis statements . Then, outline the arguments that support your thesis.

Your arguments should develop the thesis in a logical manner. That logic, unlike more standard academic writing, may initially emphasize the author’s argument while you develop your own in the course of the review. The relative emphasis depends on the nature of the review: if readers may be more interested in the work itself, you may want to make the work and the author more prominent; if you want the review to be about your perspective and opinions, then you may structure the review to privilege your observations over (but never separate from) those of the work under review. What follows is just one of many ways to organize a review.

Introduction

Since most reviews are brief, many writers begin with a catchy quip or anecdote that succinctly delivers their argument. But you can introduce your review differently depending on the argument and audience. The Writing Center’s handout on introductions can help you find an approach that works. In general, you should include:

The name of the author and the book title and the main theme.
Relevant details about who the author is and where they stand in the genre or field of inquiry. You could also link the title to the subject to show how the title explains the subject matter.
The context of the book and/or your review. Placing your review in a framework that makes sense to your audience alerts readers to your “take” on the book. Perhaps you want to situate a book about the Cuban revolution in the context of Cold War rivalries between the United States and the Soviet Union. Another reviewer might want to consider the book in the framework of Latin American social movements. Your choice of context informs your argument.
The thesis of the book. If you are reviewing fiction, this may be difficult since novels, plays, and short stories rarely have explicit arguments. But identifying the book’s particular novelty, angle, or originality allows you to show what specific contribution the piece is trying to make.
Your thesis about the book.

Summary of content

This should be brief, as analysis takes priority. In the course of making your assessment, you’ll hopefully be backing up your assertions with concrete evidence from the book, so some summary will be dispersed throughout other parts of the review.

The necessary amount of summary also depends on your audience. Graduate students, beware! If you are writing book reviews for colleagues—to prepare for comprehensive exams, for example—you may want to devote more attention to summarizing the book’s contents. If, on the other hand, your audience has already read the book—such as a class assignment on the same work—you may have more liberty to explore more subtle points and to emphasize your own argument. See our handout on summary for more tips.

Analysis and evaluation of the book

Your analysis and evaluation should be organized into paragraphs that deal with single aspects of your argument. This arrangement can be challenging when your purpose is to consider the book as a whole, but it can help you differentiate elements of your criticism and pair assertions with evidence more clearly. You do not necessarily need to work chronologically through the book as you discuss it. Given the argument you want to make, you can organize your paragraphs more usefully by themes, methods, or other elements of the book. If you find it useful to include comparisons to other books, keep them brief so that the book under review remains in the spotlight. Avoid excessive quotation and give a specific page reference in parentheses when you do quote. Remember that you can state many of the author’s points in your own words.

Sum up or restate your thesis or make the final judgment regarding the book. You should not introduce new evidence for your argument in the conclusion. You can, however, introduce new ideas that go beyond the book if they extend the logic of your own thesis. This paragraph needs to balance the book’s strengths and weaknesses in order to unify your evaluation. Did the body of your review have three negative paragraphs and one favorable one? What do they all add up to? The Writing Center’s handout on conclusions can help you make a final assessment.

Finally, a few general considerations:

Review the book in front of you, not the book you wish the author had written. You can and should point out shortcomings or failures, but don’t criticize the book for not being something it was never intended to be.
With any luck, the author of the book worked hard to find the right words to express her ideas. You should attempt to do the same. Precise language allows you to control the tone of your review.
Never hesitate to challenge an assumption, approach, or argument. Be sure, however, to cite specific examples to back up your assertions carefully.
Try to present a balanced argument about the value of the book for its audience. You’re entitled—and sometimes obligated—to voice strong agreement or disagreement. But keep in mind that a bad book takes as long to write as a good one, and every author deserves fair treatment. Harsh judgments are difficult to prove and can give readers the sense that you were unfair in your assessment.
A great place to learn about book reviews is to look at examples. The New York Times Sunday Book Review and The New York Review of Books can show you how professional writers review books.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Drewry, John. 1974. Writing Book Reviews. Boston: Greenwood Press.

Hoge, James. 1987. Literary Reviewing. Charlottesville: University Virginia of Press.

Sova, Dawn, and Harry Teitelbaum. 2002. How to Write Book Reports , 4th ed. Lawrenceville, NY: Thomson/Arco.

Walford, A.J. 1986. Reviews and Reviewing: A Guide. Phoenix: Oryx Press.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Top 5 Paid Indie Book Review Services Compared

It’s difficult to know exactly what you’re getting when you shop for a professional review, so Self-Publishing Review decided to commission a study to look at eleven factors that have been brought to our attention by SPR clients most often, and compared our services to the competition.

Here at SPR, we consider that we are one of five review service big-hitters, and therefore we compared ourselves to each of those: BlueInk Review, Foreword Clarion, Kirkus Reviews, and Indie Reader. We chose these because they use professional writers, have good quality websites and a sizeable brand presence in the indie book arena.

We were firstly glad to see that we are the most economical review service out there, and also the speediest. We also offer the most words in a single review, and we were one of three services to offer provable testimonials straight from clients on our website.

There are however some other favorable assets to some of our competitors, which may balance out the reasons behind the bigger price tags.

ForeWord Clarion

Foreword Clarion are one of the set-in-stone services on the block, and do offer a solid review service with a star rating and links on a clean and bustling website; but Clarion don’t offer any extras. At Clarion, it seems your review may be shared on their Facebook but they currently have only 68 likes. Foreword’s main Facebook does not share reviews as a rule, it seems. They come up second-speediest for their regular review turnaround time at six weeks.

USP – Clarion promises to share your review with “our partners, such as Ingram, Baker & Taylor, Cengage, Bowker, and EBSCO [who] will spread the word to thousands of librarians and booksellers.” Their reviews are written as formal copy giving you the opportunity to use sections accordingly, and have the sections stand alone, such as their “Money Quote”.

Downside – Cost

Kirkus Reviews

Kirkus Indie Reviews do offer some flimsy promises of sharing your review on their newsletter, with 50,000 readers, but it seems the word “may” instead of “will” implies it’s at their discretion, as is the glimmer of a chance to be featured in Kirkus Reviews Magazine, and apart from being shared on the usual platforms (Google is mentioned, but that’s anything on the web) there doesn’t seem much else, so you are paying for the privilege of adding the review to your Amazon or Goodreads author section and showing off the stars Kirkus have given you along with a quote. Depending on what sort of writer you are this may or may not work for you sales wise. Kirkus is renowned for having professional reviewers, and the tryouts are tough for the job, so you will certainly get a well-crafted review for marketing purposes. Having said that, at 250 words priced at up to $575, it seems rather short of a good deal. You are definitely paying for the name at Kirkus.

USP – Biggest name in indie books means you get to quote Kirkus on your author page and get a chance to be in an industry print magazine. Copy is likely to be decent and very useable, and written in a formal copy format so you can use various parts of your review for different purposes.

Downside – Cost, time and the site features all kinds of books mixed in, meaning your self-pubbed has a lot of work to do to get seen if not picked up. See ALLi’s article on Kirkus reviews here.

BlueInk Review

BlueInk Review, our seasonal partners, offer more of a literary package. Their extras include sharing on library lists and in publishing circles, and considering that co-owner Patricia Moosbrugger is also a seasoned literary agent, the review becomes a small part of a promising kickstart for any author. You can also be sure of a fully edited and proofread review from a professional at BlueInk, and their service remains personal and prompt. BlueInk also share select reviews on their flourishing Facebook page as well as Pinterest and Twitter. Only exceptional books will receive a star rating.

USP – Literary connections and library listings are a plus, reviews are well-written and customer service is impeccable, often do deals with partners, such as SPR, that give discounts and offers.

Downside – No sales links to book

IndieReader

IndieReader has just put prices up by as much as $100, so it seems that their claims of being “the most cost-effective” review service need some further examination. Personally I think their star system comes off kind of snarky instead of encouraging: one star apparently meaning, “Really bad; there’s a reason this book is self-pubbed.” which seems mean-spirited for a community-based industry. However, their site is clean, smart and modern and their mailing list is really informative. Again, you don’t get any “extras” so you are just paying for a review that takes up to 9 weeks depending on what service you choose.

However, IndieReader is an incredibly good read and a go-to for industry news, so it’s definitely worth looking at some exposure with IR as part of a marketing plan.

USP – Bustling website means your review will get seen. The second-lowest priced service.

Downside – Star-rating and review style may be a little terse for some, turnaround is slow.

We’ve got three review packages, starting at $69 if you need a quick fix of exposure within 2 weeks. Both our SPR review packages deliver in 4 weeks and have 500 words, and there are a ton of extras and discounts for members.

If we combine our readership of around 37,000 on social media allowing for repeats, plus our 7,000 subscribers, it seems we are doing pretty well on getting reviews seen, and we share the actual URL of the review on social media, our homepage and newsletters as part of the service.

We definitely score on cost, speed, plenty of copy, plenty of extras for marketing and exposure, and we provide lots of testimonials for potential clients to see what we do.

Have a look at our review packages here.

Looking at this study we’ve learned about developing our brand, and that is next on the agenda.

Until then, remember, a paid review is not just useful on the site you bought it on, but it offers a great advantage for having press release copy, back of book copy, star ratings and editorial reviews on all your sales outlets. Paid reviews are an essential part of a professional book marketing plan, and we’re all here to help you discover your target audience and to use the right language to sell your book as an indie author.

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How to Write a Book Review: The Ultimate Guide

WHAT IS A BOOK REVIEW?

Traditionally, book reviews are evaluations of a recently published book in any genre. Usually, around the 500 to 700-word mark, they briefly describe a text’s main elements while appraising the work’s strengths and weaknesses. Published book reviews can appear in newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. They provide the reader with an overview of the book itself and indicate whether or not the reviewer would recommend the book to the reader.

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF A BOOK REVIEW?

There was a time when book reviews were a regular appearance in every quality newspaper and many periodicals. They were essential elements in whether or not a book would sell well. A review from a heavyweight critic could often be the deciding factor in whether a book became a bestseller or a damp squib. In the last few decades, however, the book review’s influence has waned considerably, with many potential book buyers preferring to consult customer reviews on Amazon, or sites like Goodreads, before buying. As a result, book review’s appearance in newspapers, journals, and digital media has become less frequent.

WHY BOTHER TEACHING STUDENTS TO WRITE BOOK REVIEWS AT ALL?

Even in the heyday of the book review’s influence, few students who learned the craft of writing a book review became literary critics! The real value of crafting a well-written book review for a student does not lie in their ability to impact book sales. Understanding how to produce a well-written book review helps students to:

● Engage critically with a text

● Critically evaluate a text

● Respond personally to a range of different writing genres

● Improve their own reading, writing, and thinking skills.

Not to Be Confused with a Book Report!

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A BOOK REVIEW AND A BOOK REPORT?

While the terms are often used interchangeably, there are clear differences in both the purpose and the format of the two genres. Generally speaking, book reports aim to give a more detailed outline of what occurs in a book. A book report on a work of fiction will tend to give a comprehensive account of the characters, major plot lines, and themes in the book. Book reports are usually written around the K-12 age range, while book reviews tend not to be undertaken by those at the younger end of this age range due to the need for the higher-level critical skills required in writing them. At their highest expression, book reviews are written at the college level and by professional critics.

Learn how to write a book review step by step with our complete guide for students and teachers by familiarizing yourself with the structure and features.

BOOK REVIEW STRUCTURE

ANALYZE Evaluate the book with a critical mind.

THOROUGHNESS The whole is greater than the sum of all its parts. Review the book as a WHOLE.

COMPARE Where appropriate compare to similar texts and genres.

THUMBS UP OR DOWN? You are going to have to inevitably recommend or reject this book to potential readers.

BE CONSISTENT Take a stance and stick with it throughout your review.

FEATURES OF A BOOK REVIEW

PAST TENSE You are writing about a book you have already read.

EMOTIVE LANGUAGE Whatever your stance or opinion be passionate about it. Your audience will thank you for it.

VOICE Both active and passive voice are used in recounts.

A COMPLETE UNIT ON REVIEW AND ANALYSIS OF TEXTS

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This collection of 21 INDEPENDENT TASKS and GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS takes students beyond the hype, special effects and trailers to look at visual literacy from several perspectives offering DEEP LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES by watching a SERIES, DOCUMENTARY, FILM, and even VIDEO GAMES.

ELEMENTS OF A BOOK REVIEW

As with any of the writing genres we teach our students, a book review can be helpfully explained in terms of criteria. While there is much to the ‘art’ of writing, there is also, thankfully, a lot of the nuts and bolts that can be listed too. Have students consider the following elements before writing:

● Title: Often, the title of the book review will correspond to the title of the text itself, but there may also be some examination of the title’s relevance. How does it fit into the purpose of the work as a whole? Does it convey a message or reveal larger themes explored within the work?

● Author: Within the book review, there may be some discussion of who the author is and what they have written before, especially if it relates to the current work being reviewed. There may be some mention of the author’s style and what they are best known for. If the author has received any awards or prizes, this may also be mentioned within the body of the review.

● Genre: A book review will identify the genre that the book belongs to, whether fiction or nonfiction, poetry, romance, science-fiction, history etc. The genre will likely tie in, too with who the intended audience for the book is and what the overall purpose of the work is.

● Book Jacket / Cover: Often, a book’s cover will contain artwork that is worthy of comment. It may contain interesting details related to the text that contribute to, or detract from, the work as a whole.

● Structure: The book’s structure will often be heavily informed by its genre. Have students examine how the book is organized before writing their review. Does it contain a preface from a guest editor, for example? Is it written in sections or chapters? Does it have a table of contents, index, glossary etc.? While all these details may not make it into the review itself, looking at how the book is structured may reveal some interesting aspects.

● Publisher and Price: A book review will usually contain details of who publishes the book and its cost. A review will often provide details of where the book is available too.

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BOOK REVIEW KEY ELEMENTS

As students read and engage with the work they will review, they will develop a sense of the shape their review will take. This will begin with the summary. Encourage students to take notes during the reading of the work that will help them in writing the summary that will form an essential part of their review. Aspects of the book they may wish to take notes on in a work of fiction may include:

● Characters: Who are the main characters? What are their motivations? Are they convincingly drawn? Or are they empathetic characters?

● Themes: What are the main themes of the work? Are there recurring motifs in the work? Is the exploration of the themes deep or surface only?

● Style: What are the key aspects of the writer’s style? How does it fit into the wider literary world?

● Plot: What is the story’s main catalyst? What happens in the rising action? What are the story’s subplots?

A book review will generally begin with a short summary of the work itself. However, it is important not to give too much away, remind students – no spoilers, please! For nonfiction works, this may be a summary of the main arguments of the work, again, without giving too much detail away. In a work of fiction, a book review will often summarise up to the rising action of the piece without going beyond to reveal too much!

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The summary should also provide some orientation for the reader. Given the nature of the purpose of a review, it is important that students’ consider their intended audience in the writing of their review. Readers will most likely not have read the book in question and will require some orientation. This is often achieved through introductions to the main characters, themes, primary arguments etc. This will help the reader to gauge whether or not the book is of interest to them.

Once your student has summarized the work, it is time to ‘review’ in earnest. At this point, the student should begin to detail their own opinion of the book. To do this well they should:

i. Make It Personal

Often when teaching essay writing we will talk to our students about the importance of climbing up and down the ladder of abstraction. Just as it is helpful to explore large, more abstract concepts in an essay by bringing it down to Earth, in a book review, it is important that students can relate the characters, themes, ideas etc to their own lives.

Book reviews are meant to be subjective. They are opinion pieces, and opinions grow out of our experiences of life. Encourage students to link the work they are writing about to their own personal life within the body of the review. By making this personal connection to the work, students contextualize their opinions for the readers and help them to understand whether the book will be of interest to them or not in the process.

ii. Make It Universal

Just as it is important to climb down the ladder of abstraction to show how the work relates to individual life, it is important to climb upwards on the ladder too. Students should endeavor to show how the ideas explored in the book relate to the wider world. The may be in the form of the universality of the underlying themes in a work of fiction or, for example, the international implications for arguments expressed in a work of nonfiction.

iii. Support Opinions with Evidence

A book review is a subjective piece of writing by its very nature. However, just because it is subjective does not mean that opinions do not need to be justified. Make sure students understand how to back up their opinions with various forms of evidence, for example, quotations, statistics, and the use of primary and secondary sources.

EDIT AND REVISE YOUR BOOK REVIEW

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As with any writing genre, encourage students to polish things up with review and revision at the end. Encourage them to proofread and check for accurate spelling throughout, with particular attention to the author’s name, character names, publisher etc.

It is good practice too for students to double-check their use of evidence. Are statements supported? Are the statistics used correctly? Are the quotations from the text accurate? Mistakes such as these uncorrected can do great damage to the value of a book review as they can undermine the reader’s confidence in the writer’s judgement.

The discipline of writing book reviews offers students opportunities to develop their writing skills and exercise their critical faculties. Book reviews can be valuable standalone activities or serve as a part of a series of activities engaging with a central text. They can also serve as an effective springboard into later discussion work based on the ideas and issues explored in a particular book. Though the book review does not hold the sway it once did in the mind’s of the reading public, it still serves as an effective teaching tool in our classrooms today.

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Teaching Resources

Use our resources and tools to improve your student’s writing skills through proven teaching strategies.

BOOK REVIEW GRAPHIC ORGANIZER (TEMPLATE)

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101 DIGITAL & PRINT GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS FOR ALL CURRICULUM AREAS

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Introduce your students to 21st-century learning with this GROWING BUNDLE OF 101 EDITABLE & PRINTABLE GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS. ✌ NO PREP REQUIRED!!! ✌ Go paperless, and let your students express their knowledge and creativity through the power of technology and collaboration inside and outside the classroom with ease.

Whilst you don’t have to have a 1:1 or BYOD classroom to benefit from this bundle, it has been purpose-built to deliver through platforms such as ✔ GOOGLE CLASSROOM, ✔ OFFICE 365, ✔ or any CLOUD-BASED LEARNING PLATFORM.

Book and Movie review writing examples (Student Writing Samples)

Below are a collection of student writing samples of book reviews. Click on the image to enlarge and explore them in greater detail. Please take a moment to both read the movie or book review in detail but also the teacher and student guides which highlight some of the key elements of writing a text review

Please understand these student writing samples are not intended to be perfect examples for each age or grade level but a piece of writing for students and teachers to explore together to critically analyze to improve student writing skills and deepen their understanding of book review writing.

We would recommend reading the example either a year above and below, as well as the grade you are currently working with to gain a broader appreciation of this text type .

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BOOK REVIEW VIDEO TUTORIALS

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How to Write a Book Review: Introduction

Introduction

Steps to Write a Book Review

Other Resources on Writing Reviews

Writing Book Reviews

Academic book reviews are helpful in enabling people to decide if they want to read a given book. A book review is not a book report, which you may hae done in elementary school. A book report describes the basic contents. Book reviews go far deeper than that. This guide will explain what an academic book review is and how to write one well.

Introduction to Writing Book Reviews

What is a Book Review?
Benefits of Writing Book Reviews

What is a Book Review?

Describes the purpose of the book
Describes the contents of the book (subject of each chapter)
Analyzes the approach/argument(s) of the book: Does it seem accurate? Does it make sense? Is the argument strong or weak?
Assesses whether the book did what the author said it would do
Suggests potential audiences for the book (pastors, students, professors, lay people) and potential uses, such as a textbook
Based upon a careful reading of the entire book
Uses a structured, formal, academic tone
Most often appears in academic journals, though more informal versions may appear in magazines and blogs
May include comparisons to other works in the same subject, e.g., if you are reviewing a book on Paul's theology, it would help to compare it briefly to another book on Paul's theology
In an academic setting, a review assumes an academic audience

A book review requires the reviewer to read the book carefully and reflect on its contents. The review should tell a reader what the book seeks to do and offer an appraisal of how well the author(s) accomplished this goal. That is why this is a "critical" book review. You are analyzing the book, not simply describing it. A review assumes that the readers know the vocabulary of the discipline. For example, a reviewer of a book on the Gospel of Matthew could use "Q" and not need to explain it because it is assumed that the audience knows what Q is in the context of talking about the canonical gospels.

A book review does not

Seek to be entertaining and/or engaging
Describe your feelings regarding the book, e.g., “I loved it,” “it was terrible,” or “I disagree completely.”
Superficial treatment similar to the blurb on the back of the book
Offers an ad hominem (against the person) attack on the author

Here are two examples of typical academic book reviews:

https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lsdar&AN=ATLAiFZU171223002713&site=eds-live&authtype=ip,sso&custid=s8984749

https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lsdar&AN=ATLAi9KZ180630003303&site=eds-live&authtype=ip,sso&custid=s8984749

You may see non-academic book reviews that are more inform al or use humor but that is not appropriate for an academic book review.

Why would you write a book review? There are a few reasons.

Meet a course requirement
Understand a book better and grow as a scholar
Write reviews for publications in the future, such as magazines

1. Your professor assigned it. You are probably reading this page because a professor gave you an assignment to write a review. This is straightforward. Your professor may have a specific set of requirements or directions and you need to follow those, even if they differ from what you read here. In either case, assume that your review is for a large audience.

2. Writing a review will help you understand a book better. When you are going to write a good book review, you need to read the entire book carefully. By assigning a book review, the professor is seeking to help you understand the book better. A book review is a critical assessment of a book. “Critical” here means analytical. What did the author seek to do and how convincing was it? Your professor wants you to read the book carefully enough to explain both. A critical assessment recognizes that the status of an author/scholar is no guarantee that the book accomplishes its goal. The skill of critical assessment is valuable in all your research work, both now and after graduation.

3. You may have an opportunity in the future to write a book review for a denominational publication, a magazine like Christianity Today , a church newsletter, or in a blog post, which is very common.

So, a book review can fulfill a course requirement, make you better at critical assessment of the views of others, and create opportunities to use that skill for various publications.

Step 1: Read the book carefully.

Step 2: Write the basics.

Step 3: Fill in the details.

These steps are explained in the next tab of this research guide.

This is not for Book Reflections

If you have a (personal) reflection on a book assigned, what this guide says, besides step #1, likely does not apply to your assignment. You need to ask your professor for guidance on writing a reflection. There are two reasons.

1. A book reflection is not a standard, academic type of document. Therefore, general help based upon reading book reviews is not relevant.

2. Book reflections are heavily dependent upon exactly what a professor asks for. These frequently require comparing good and bad points of the book. That is not a feature of book reviews as such and reviews do not include your personal reflections.

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13 Types of Book Review: The Complete List Explained

by Antony W

October 5, 2023

In one of our posts in this category, we showed you how to write a book review from scratch. Before you get started, though, it’s important to know the different types of book review your instructor would want you to work on.

That’s what we look at in this guide.

Let’s get started.

What is a Book Review?

A book review a critical analysis that provides details on recently published works, including a brief synopsis of the book’s main concepts such as its plot and characters.

The review includes a succinct summary of the book’s strengths and weaknesses to offer a comprehensive assessment from the reviewer to the author.

Book reviews offer readers a range of perspectives on a book’s merits and flaws, helping them to decide whether to read it or not.

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Types of Book Review Explained

The following are the types of book reviews you should know about and write based on the review format that we’ve already talked about:

1. Endorsements Book Reviews

Endorsements can be powerful tools to use before publishing a book. Authors can share their manuscript, complete or not, with a well-known individual in their field and request a short review.

These endorsements primarily work for non-fiction and business books, providing authority from the outset.

2. Trade Reviews

Trade reviews are reviews that are mainly appealing to librarians and booksellers.

Trade reviews have two substantial downsides: they charge for book reviews, and they do not guarantee a positive review. However, they are the most trusted speakers in the publishing industry.

If an author wants to promote their book to retailers or feature it in the library, the best place to start is with trade reviews. These companies list reviewed books on their website, and many readers follow such reviews.

3. Reader Reviews

Reader reviews are feedback written by readers who bought and read a published book. These reviews can be negative or positive and could be from anyone.

An example of where to find reader reviews is Goodreads.

The platform has less stringent measures, allowing friends to follow each other’s book reviews and reading progress.

4. Editorial Reviews

Editorial reviews are third-party reviews, such as an article or blog, from a professional entity that does not publish books. Examples include freelancing bloggers, news reporters, or magazines.

Editorial reviews can be paid or done free.

5. Fiction Book Review

A review of a work of fiction typically involves a critical analysis of recently published or revised novels, short stories, legends, and fairy tales.

Such reviews provide details about the book’s central characters, key plot points, and settings, while also assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the narrative and its themes, as well as the author’s writing style.

6. Student Book Review

Student book reviews encourage students to develop their own opinions on an author’s ideas, usually by working through worksheets that pose a series of questions.

These reviews represent a form of literary criticism that evaluates an author’s ideas, writing techniques, and overall work quality. Opinion-based analyses that are relevant to the book’s content, they serve as a valuable exercise for students aspiring to become editors or literary critics.

7. Professional Book Review

Professional book reviews are crafted by experts and it critics who work for reputable institutions such as magazines, newspapers, blogs, online publications, and paid services agencies.

These reviewers possess a strong background in book writing, which enables them to produce high-quality reviews that often appear on the front pages of major news outlets. Many booksellers also rely on professional book reviews to make informed recommendations.

8. Short Book Review

You can find short book reviews on blogs and online review platforms, providing an overview of books and authors, a brief synopsis, and a concise analysis.

These reviews highlight the essential information that helps readers decide whether to read the book based on the reviewer’s commentary.

It’s important to ensure that the review is unbiased, including both the author’s strengths and weaknesses in effectively conveying their message.

9. Blank Book Review

A blank book review serves as a template for constructing a critical analysis of a book, covering its general information, subject, and theme.

It guides reviewers, particularly those who are new to the process, in creating an impartial review.

Moreover, it provides an opportunity for individuals to hone their analytical and critical thinking skills by applying the blank book review to different genres.

10. Poetry Book Review

When writing a poetry book review, the focus is on providing a critical analysis of a collection of poetry by a single poet or a group of poets. The review delves into the genre of the poems, as well as how the authors convey their emotions through each verse.

To organize their thoughts, reviewers may use a graphic organizer or chart, especially if there are multiple perspectives to consider.

11. Academic Book Review

Academic book reviews, also known as scholarly book reviews, are in scholarly journals written by academic scholars.

These reviews serve multiple purposes, including educating other academics about the book’s quality and objectives while explaining how the book fits into existing literature. Reviews are crucial resources that help other scholars determine whether to read or purchase the book.

12. Simple Book Review

A simple book review discusses a specific book, highlighting its main idea, characters, and genre. The book review highlights the individual’s ability to comprehend and grasp the book’s contents while evaluating the author’s arguments and issues raised.

Writing a book review of this kind is similar to writing an essay, as it requires presenting evidence and organizing the information in a clear and structured manner.

13. University Book Review

University book reviews are assignments or projects that university students receive from their professors, focusing on analyzing a particular text and writing an evaluation of its content.

The document should include an introduction that provides details such as the author’s name, book title, genre, and characters. A comprehensive analysis to identify the main ideas is also essential, followed by an overall assessment of the book’s quality.

About the author

Antony W is a professional writer and coach at Help for Assessment. He spends countless hours every day researching and writing great content filled with expert advice on how to write engaging essays, research papers, and assignments.

17 Book Review Examples to Help You Write the Perfect Review

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Blog – Posted on Friday, Mar 29

17 book review examples to help you write the perfect review.

It’s an exciting time to be a book reviewer. Once confined to print newspapers and journals, reviews now dot many corridors of the Internet — forever helping others discover their next great read. That said, every book reviewer will face a familiar panic: how can you do justice to a great book in just a thousand words?

As you know, the best way to learn how to do something is by immersing yourself in it. Luckily, the Internet (i.e. Goodreads and other review sites , in particular) has made book reviews more accessible than ever — which means that there are a lot of book reviews examples out there for you to view!

In this post, we compiled 17 prototypical book review examples in multiple genres to help you figure out how to write the perfect review . If you want to jump straight to the examples, you can skip the next section. Otherwise, let’s first check out what makes up a good review.

Are you interested in becoming a book reviewer? We recommend you check out Reedsy Discovery , where you can earn money for writing reviews — and are guaranteed people will read your reviews! To register as a book reviewer, sign up here.

Pro-tip : But wait! How are you sure if you should become a book reviewer in the first place? If you're on the fence, or curious about your match with a book reviewing career, take our quick quiz:

Should you become a book reviewer?

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What must a book review contain?

Like all works of art, no two book reviews will be identical. But fear not: there are a few guidelines for any aspiring book reviewer to follow. Most book reviews, for instance, are less than 1,500 words long, with the sweet spot hitting somewhere around the 1,000-word mark. (However, this may vary depending on the platform on which you’re writing, as we’ll see later.)

In addition, all reviews share some universal elements, as shown in our book review templates . These include:

A review will offer a concise plot summary of the book.
A book review will offer an evaluation of the work.
A book review will offer a recommendation for the audience.

If these are the basic ingredients that make up a book review, it’s the tone and style with which the book reviewer writes that brings the extra panache. This will differ from platform to platform, of course. A book review on Goodreads, for instance, will be much more informal and personal than a book review on Kirkus Reviews, as it is catering to a different audience. However, at the end of the day, the goal of all book reviews is to give the audience the tools to determine whether or not they’d like to read the book themselves.

Keeping that in mind, let’s proceed to some book review examples to put all of this in action.

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Book review examples for fiction books

Since story is king in the world of fiction, it probably won’t come as any surprise to learn that a book review for a novel will concentrate on how well the story was told .

That said, book reviews in all genres follow the same basic formula that we discussed earlier. In these examples, you’ll be able to see how book reviewers on different platforms expertly intertwine the plot summary and their personal opinions of the book to produce a clear, informative, and concise review.

Note: Some of the book review examples run very long. If a book review is truncated in this post, we’ve indicated by including a […] at the end, but you can always read the entire review if you click on the link provided.

Examples of literary fiction book reviews

Kirkus Reviews reviews Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man :

An extremely powerful story of a young Southern Negro, from his late high school days through three years of college to his life in Harlem.

His early training prepared him for a life of humility before white men, but through injustices- large and small, he came to realize that he was an "invisible man". People saw in him only a reflection of their preconceived ideas of what he was, denied his individuality, and ultimately did not see him at all. This theme, which has implications far beyond the obvious racial parallel, is skillfully handled. The incidents of the story are wholly absorbing. The boy's dismissal from college because of an innocent mistake, his shocked reaction to the anonymity of the North and to Harlem, his nightmare experiences on a one-day job in a paint factory and in the hospital, his lightning success as the Harlem leader of a communistic organization known as the Brotherhood, his involvement in black versus white and black versus black clashes and his disillusion and understanding of his invisibility- all climax naturally in scenes of violence and riot, followed by a retreat which is both literal and figurative. Parts of this experience may have been told before, but never with such freshness, intensity and power.

This is Ellison's first novel, but he has complete control of his story and his style. Watch it.

Lyndsey reviews George Orwell’s 1984 on Goodreads:

YOU. ARE. THE. DEAD. Oh my God. I got the chills so many times toward the end of this book. It completely blew my mind. It managed to surpass my high expectations AND be nothing at all like I expected. Or in Newspeak "Double Plus Good." Let me preface this with an apology. If I sound stunningly inarticulate at times in this review, I can't help it. My mind is completely fried.

This book is like the dystopian Lord of the Rings, with its richly developed culture and economics, not to mention a fully developed language called Newspeak, or rather more of the anti-language, whose purpose is to limit speech and understanding instead of to enhance and expand it. The world-building is so fully fleshed out and spine-tinglingly terrifying that it's almost as if George travelled to such a place, escaped from it, and then just wrote it all down.

I read Fahrenheit 451 over ten years ago in my early teens. At the time, I remember really wanting to read 1984, although I never managed to get my hands on it. I'm almost glad I didn't. Though I would not have admitted it at the time, it would have gone over my head. Or at the very least, I wouldn't have been able to appreciate it fully. […]

The New York Times reviews Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry :

Three-quarters of the way through Lisa Halliday’s debut novel, “Asymmetry,” a British foreign correspondent named Alistair is spending Christmas on a compound outside of Baghdad. His fellow revelers include cameramen, defense contractors, United Nations employees and aid workers. Someone’s mother has FedExed a HoneyBaked ham from Maine; people are smoking by the swimming pool. It is 2003, just days after Saddam Hussein’s capture, and though the mood is optimistic, Alistair is worrying aloud about the ethics of his chosen profession, wondering if reporting on violence doesn’t indirectly abet violence and questioning why he’d rather be in a combat zone than reading a picture book to his son. But every time he returns to London, he begins to “spin out.” He can’t go home. “You observe what people do with their freedom — what they don’t do — and it’s impossible not to judge them for it,” he says.

The line, embedded unceremoniously in the middle of a page-long paragraph, doubles, like so many others in “Asymmetry,” as literary criticism. Halliday’s novel is so strange and startlingly smart that its mere existence seems like commentary on the state of fiction. One finishes “Asymmetry” for the first or second (or like this reader, third) time and is left wondering what other writers are not doing with their freedom — and, like Alistair, judging them for it.

Despite its title, “Asymmetry” comprises two seemingly unrelated sections of equal length, appended by a slim and quietly shocking coda. Halliday’s prose is clean and lean, almost reportorial in the style of W. G. Sebald, and like the murmurings of a shy person at a cocktail party, often comic only in single clauses. It’s a first novel that reads like the work of an author who has published many books over many years. […]

Emily W. Thompson reviews Michael Doane's The Crossing on Reedsy Discovery :

In Doane’s debut novel, a young man embarks on a journey of self-discovery with surprising results.

An unnamed protagonist (The Narrator) is dealing with heartbreak. His love, determined to see the world, sets out for Portland, Oregon. But he’s a small-town boy who hasn’t traveled much. So, the Narrator mourns her loss and hides from life, throwing himself into rehabbing an old motorcycle. Until one day, he takes a leap; he packs his bike and a few belongings and heads out to find the Girl.

Following in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac and William Least Heat-Moon, Doane offers a coming of age story about a man finding himself on the backroads of America. Doane’s a gifted writer with fluid prose and insightful observations, using The Narrator’s personal interactions to illuminate the diversity of the United States.

The Narrator initially sticks to the highways, trying to make it to the West Coast as quickly as possible. But a hitchhiker named Duke convinces him to get off the beaten path and enjoy the ride. “There’s not a place that’s like any other,” [39] Dukes contends, and The Narrator realizes he’s right. Suddenly, the trip is about the journey, not just the destination. The Narrator ditches his truck and traverses the deserts and mountains on his bike. He destroys his phone, cutting off ties with his past and living only in the moment.

As he crosses the country, The Narrator connects with several unique personalities whose experiences and views deeply impact his own. Duke, the complicated cowboy and drifter, who opens The Narrator’s eyes to a larger world. Zooey, the waitress in Colorado who opens his heart and reminds him that love can be found in this big world. And Rosie, The Narrator’s sweet landlady in Portland, who helps piece him back together both physically and emotionally.

This supporting cast of characters is excellent. Duke, in particular, is wonderfully nuanced and complicated. He’s a throwback to another time, a man without a cell phone who reads Sartre and sleeps under the stars. Yet he’s also a grifter with a “love ‘em and leave ‘em” attitude that harms those around him. It’s fascinating to watch The Narrator wrestle with Duke’s behavior, trying to determine which to model and which to discard.

Doane creates a relatable protagonist in The Narrator, whose personal growth doesn’t erase his faults. His willingness to hit the road with few resources is admirable, and he’s prescient enough to recognize the jealousy of those who cannot or will not take the leap. His encounters with new foods, places, and people broaden his horizons. Yet his immaturity and selfishness persist. He tells Rosie she’s been a good mother to him but chooses to ignore the continuing concern from his own parents as he effectively disappears from his old life.

Despite his flaws, it’s a pleasure to accompany The Narrator on his physical and emotional journey. The unexpected ending is a fitting denouement to an epic and memorable road trip.

The Book Smugglers review Anissa Gray’s The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls :

I am still dipping my toes into the literally fiction pool, finding what works for me and what doesn’t. Books like The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray are definitely my cup of tea.

Althea and Proctor Cochran had been pillars of their economically disadvantaged community for years – with their local restaurant/small market and their charity drives. Until they are found guilty of fraud for stealing and keeping most of the money they raised and sent to jail. Now disgraced, their entire family is suffering the consequences, specially their twin teenage daughters Baby Vi and Kim. To complicate matters even more: Kim was actually the one to call the police on her parents after yet another fight with her mother. […]

Examples of children’s and YA fiction book reviews

The Book Hookup reviews Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give :

♥ Quick Thoughts and Rating: 5 stars! I can’t imagine how challenging it would be to tackle the voice of a movement like Black Lives Matter, but I do know that Thomas did it with a finesse only a talented author like herself possibly could. With an unapologetically realistic delivery packed with emotion, The Hate U Give is a crucially important portrayal of the difficulties minorities face in our country every single day. I have no doubt that this book will be met with resistance by some (possibly many) and slapped with a “controversial” label, but if you’ve ever wondered what it was like to walk in a POC’s shoes, then I feel like this is an unflinchingly honest place to start.

In Angie Thomas’s debut novel, Starr Carter bursts on to the YA scene with both heart-wrecking and heartwarming sincerity. This author is definitely one to watch.

♥ Review: The hype around this book has been unquestionable and, admittedly, that made me both eager to get my hands on it and terrified to read it. I mean, what if I was to be the one person that didn’t love it as much as others? (That seems silly now because of how truly mesmerizing THUG was in the most heartbreakingly realistic way.) However, with the relevancy of its summary in regards to the unjust predicaments POC currently face in the US, I knew this one was a must-read, so I was ready to set my fears aside and dive in. That said, I had an altogether more personal, ulterior motive for wanting to read this book. […]

The New York Times reviews Melissa Albert’s The Hazel Wood :

Alice Crewe (a last name she’s chosen for herself) is a fairy tale legacy: the granddaughter of Althea Proserpine, author of a collection of dark-as-night fairy tales called “Tales From the Hinterland.” The book has a cult following, and though Alice has never met her grandmother, she’s learned a little about her through internet research. She hasn’t read the stories, because her mother, Ella Proserpine, forbids it.

Alice and Ella have moved from place to place in an attempt to avoid the “bad luck” that seems to follow them. Weird things have happened. As a child, Alice was kidnapped by a man who took her on a road trip to find her grandmother; he was stopped by the police before they did so. When at 17 she sees that man again, unchanged despite the years, Alice panics. Then Ella goes missing, and Alice turns to Ellery Finch, a schoolmate who’s an Althea Proserpine superfan, for help in tracking down her mother. Not only has Finch read every fairy tale in the collection, but handily, he remembers them, sharing them with Alice as they journey to the mysterious Hazel Wood, the estate of her now-dead grandmother, where they hope to find Ella.

“The Hazel Wood” starts out strange and gets stranger, in the best way possible. (The fairy stories Finch relays, which Albert includes as their own chapters, are as creepy and evocative as you’d hope.) Albert seamlessly combines contemporary realism with fantasy, blurring the edges in a way that highlights that place where stories and real life convene, where magic contains truth and the world as it appears is false, where just about anything can happen, particularly in the pages of a very good book. It’s a captivating debut. […]

James reviews Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight, Moon on Goodreads:

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown is one of the books that followers of my blog voted as a must-read for our Children's Book August 2018 Readathon. Come check it out and join the next few weeks!

This picture book was such a delight. I hadn't remembered reading it when I was a child, but it might have been read to me... either way, it was like a whole new experience! It's always so difficult to convince a child to fall asleep at night. I don't have kids, but I do have a 5-month-old puppy who whines for 5 minutes every night when he goes in his cage/crate (hopefully he'll be fully housebroken soon so he can roam around when he wants). I can only imagine! I babysat a lot as a teenager and I have tons of younger cousins, nieces, and nephews, so I've been through it before, too. This was a believable experience, and it really helps show kids how to relax and just let go when it's time to sleep.

The bunny's are adorable. The rhymes are exquisite. I found it pretty fun, but possibly a little dated given many of those things aren't normal routines anymore. But the lessons to take from it are still powerful. Loved it! I want to sample some more books by this fine author and her illustrators.

Publishers Weekly reviews Elizabeth Lilly’s Geraldine :

This funny, thoroughly accomplished debut opens with two words: “I’m moving.” They’re spoken by the title character while she swoons across her family’s ottoman, and because Geraldine is a giraffe, her full-on melancholy mode is quite a spectacle. But while Geraldine may be a drama queen (even her mother says so), it won’t take readers long to warm up to her. The move takes Geraldine from Giraffe City, where everyone is like her, to a new school, where everyone else is human. Suddenly, the former extrovert becomes “That Giraffe Girl,” and all she wants to do is hide, which is pretty much impossible. “Even my voice tries to hide,” she says, in the book’s most poignant moment. “It’s gotten quiet and whispery.” Then she meets Cassie, who, though human, is also an outlier (“I’m that girl who wears glasses and likes MATH and always organizes her food”), and things begin to look up.

Lilly’s watercolor-and-ink drawings are as vividly comic and emotionally astute as her writing; just when readers think there are no more ways for Geraldine to contort her long neck, this highly promising talent comes up with something new.

Examples of genre fiction book reviews

Karlyn P reviews Nora Roberts’ Dark Witch , a paranormal romance novel , on Goodreads:

4 stars. Great world-building, weak romance, but still worth the read.

I hesitate to describe this book as a 'romance' novel simply because the book spent little time actually exploring the romance between Iona and Boyle. Sure, there IS a romance in this novel. Sprinkled throughout the book are a few scenes where Iona and Boyle meet, chat, wink at each, flirt some more, sleep together, have a misunderstanding, make up, and then profess their undying love. Very formulaic stuff, and all woven around the more important parts of this book.

The meat of this book is far more focused on the story of the Dark witch and her magically-gifted descendants living in Ireland. Despite being weak on the romance, I really enjoyed it. I think the book is probably better for it, because the romance itself was pretty lackluster stuff.

I absolutely plan to stick with this series as I enjoyed the world building, loved the Ireland setting, and was intrigued by all of the secondary characters. However, If you read Nora Roberts strictly for the romance scenes, this one might disappoint. But if you enjoy a solid background story with some dark magic and prophesies, you might enjoy it as much as I did.

I listened to this one on audio, and felt the narration was excellent.

Emily May reviews R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy Wars , an epic fantasy novel , on Goodreads:

“But I warn you, little warrior. The price of power is pain.”

Holy hell, what did I just read??

➽ A fantasy military school

➽ A rich world based on modern Chinese history

➽ Shamans and gods

➽ Detailed characterization leading to unforgettable characters

➽ Adorable, opium-smoking mentors

That's a basic list, but this book is all of that and SO MUCH MORE. I know 100% that The Poppy War will be one of my best reads of 2018.

Isn't it just so great when you find one of those books that completely drags you in, makes you fall in love with the characters, and demands that you sit on the edge of your seat for every horrific, nail-biting moment of it? This is one of those books for me. And I must issue a serious content warning: this book explores some very dark themes. Proceed with caution (or not at all) if you are particularly sensitive to scenes of war, drug use and addiction, genocide, racism, sexism, ableism, self-harm, torture, and rape (off-page but extremely horrific).

Because, despite the fairly innocuous first 200 pages, the title speaks the truth: this is a book about war. All of its horrors and atrocities. It is not sugar-coated, and it is often graphic. The "poppy" aspect refers to opium, which is a big part of this book. It is a fantasy, but the book draws inspiration from the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Rape of Nanking.

Crime Fiction Lover reviews Jessica Barry’s Freefall , a crime novel:

In some crime novels, the wrongdoing hits you between the eyes from page one. With others it’s a more subtle process, and that’s OK too. So where does Freefall fit into the sliding scale?

In truth, it’s not clear. This is a novel with a thrilling concept at its core. A woman survives plane crash, then runs for her life. However, it is the subtleties at play that will draw you in like a spider beckoning to an unwitting fly.

Like the heroine in Sharon Bolton’s Dead Woman Walking, Allison is lucky to be alive. She was the only passenger in a private plane, belonging to her fiancé, Ben, who was piloting the expensive aircraft, when it came down in woodlands in the Colorado Rockies. Ally is also the only survivor, but rather than sitting back and waiting for rescue, she is soon pulling together items that may help her survive a little longer – first aid kit, energy bars, warm clothes, trainers – before fleeing the scene. If you’re hearing the faint sound of alarm bells ringing, get used to it. There’s much, much more to learn about Ally before this tale is over.

Kirkus Reviews reviews Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One , a science-fiction novel :

Video-game players embrace the quest of a lifetime in a virtual world; screenwriter Cline’s first novel is old wine in new bottles.

The real world, in 2045, is the usual dystopian horror story. So who can blame Wade, our narrator, if he spends most of his time in a virtual world? The 18-year-old, orphaned at 11, has no friends in his vertical trailer park in Oklahoma City, while the OASIS has captivating bells and whistles, and it’s free. Its creator, the legendary billionaire James Halliday, left a curious will. He had devised an elaborate online game, a hunt for a hidden Easter egg. The finder would inherit his estate. Old-fashioned riddles lead to three keys and three gates. Wade, or rather his avatar Parzival, is the first gunter (egg-hunter) to win the Copper Key, first of three.

Halliday was obsessed with the pop culture of the 1980s, primarily the arcade games, so the novel is as much retro as futurist. Parzival’s great strength is that he has absorbed all Halliday’s obsessions; he knows by heart three essential movies, crossing the line from geek to freak. His most formidable competitors are the Sixers, contract gunters working for the evil conglomerate IOI, whose goal is to acquire the OASIS. Cline’s narrative is straightforward but loaded with exposition. It takes a while to reach a scene that crackles with excitement: the meeting between Parzival (now world famous as the lead contender) and Sorrento, the head of IOI. The latter tries to recruit Parzival; when he fails, he issues and executes a death threat. Wade’s trailer is demolished, his relatives killed; luckily Wade was not at home. Too bad this is the dramatic high point. Parzival threads his way between more ’80s games and movies to gain the other keys; it’s clever but not exciting. Even a romance with another avatar and the ultimate “epic throwdown” fail to stir the blood.

Too much puzzle-solving, not enough suspense.

Book review examples for non-fiction books

Nonfiction books are generally written to inform readers about a certain topic. As such, the focus of a nonfiction book review will be on the clarity and effectiveness of this communication . In carrying this out, a book review may analyze the author’s source materials and assess the thesis in order to determine whether or not the book meets expectations.

Again, we’ve included abbreviated versions of long reviews here, so feel free to click on the link to read the entire piece!

The Washington Post reviews David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon :

The arc of David Grann’s career reminds one of a software whiz-kid or a latest-thing talk-show host — certainly not an investigative reporter, even if he is one of the best in the business. The newly released movie of his first book, “The Lost City of Z,” is generating all kinds of Oscar talk, and now comes the release of his second book, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” the film rights to which have already been sold for $5 million in what one industry journal called the “biggest and wildest book rights auction in memory.”

Grann deserves the attention. He’s canny about the stories he chases, he’s willing to go anywhere to chase them, and he’s a maestro in his ability to parcel out information at just the right clip: a hint here, a shading of meaning there, a smartly paced buildup of multiple possibilities followed by an inevitable reversal of readerly expectations or, in some cases, by a thrilling and dislocating pull of the entire narrative rug.

All of these strengths are on display in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Around the turn of the 20th century, oil was discovered underneath Osage lands in the Oklahoma Territory, lands that were soon to become part of the state of Oklahoma. Through foresight and legal maneuvering, the Osage found a way to permanently attach that oil to themselves and shield it from the prying hands of white interlopers; this mechanism was known as “headrights,” which forbade the outright sale of oil rights and granted each full member of the tribe — and, supposedly, no one else — a share in the proceeds from any lease arrangement. For a while, the fail-safes did their job, and the Osage got rich — diamond-ring and chauffeured-car and imported-French-fashion rich — following which quite a large group of white men started to work like devils to separate the Osage from their money. And soon enough, and predictably enough, this work involved murder. Here in Jazz Age America’s most isolated of locales, dozens or even hundreds of Osage in possession of great fortunes — and of the potential for even greater fortunes in the future — were dispatched by poison, by gunshot and by dynamite. […]

Stacked Books reviews Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers :

I’ve heard a lot of great things about Malcolm Gladwell’s writing. Friends and co-workers tell me that his subjects are interesting and his writing style is easy to follow without talking down to the reader. I wasn’t disappointed with Outliers. In it, Gladwell tackles the subject of success – how people obtain it and what contributes to extraordinary success as opposed to everyday success.

The thesis – that our success depends much more on circumstances out of our control than any effort we put forth – isn’t exactly revolutionary. Most of us know it to be true. However, I don’t think I’m lying when I say that most of us also believe that we if we just try that much harder and develop our talent that much further, it will be enough to become wildly successful, despite bad or just mediocre beginnings. Not so, says Gladwell.

Most of the evidence Gladwell gives us is anecdotal, which is my favorite kind to read. I can’t really speak to how scientifically valid it is, but it sure makes for engrossing listening. For example, did you know that successful hockey players are almost all born in January, February, or March? Kids born during these months are older than the others kids when they start playing in the youth leagues, which means they’re already better at the game (because they’re bigger). Thus, they get more play time, which means their skill increases at a faster rate, and it compounds as time goes by. Within a few years, they’re much, much better than the kids born just a few months later in the year. Basically, these kids’ birthdates are a huge factor in their success as adults – and it’s nothing they can do anything about. If anyone could make hockey interesting to a Texan who only grudgingly admits the sport even exists, it’s Gladwell. […]

Quill and Quire reviews Rick Prashaw’s Soar, Adam, Soar :

Ten years ago, I read a book called Almost Perfect. The young-adult novel by Brian Katcher won some awards and was held up as a powerful, nuanced portrayal of a young trans person. But the reality did not live up to the book’s billing. Instead, it turned out to be a one-dimensional and highly fetishized portrait of a trans person’s life, one that was nevertheless repeatedly dubbed “realistic” and “affecting” by non-transgender readers possessing only a vague, mass-market understanding of trans experiences.

In the intervening decade, trans narratives have emerged further into the literary spotlight, but those authored by trans people ourselves – and by trans men in particular – have seemed to fall under the shadow of cisgender sensationalized imaginings. Two current Canadian releases – Soar, Adam, Soar and This One Looks Like a Boy – provide a pointed object lesson into why trans-authored work about transgender experiences remains critical.

To be fair, Soar, Adam, Soar isn’t just a story about a trans man. It’s also a story about epilepsy, the medical establishment, and coming of age as seen through a grieving father’s eyes. Adam, Prashaw’s trans son, died unexpectedly at age 22. Woven through the elder Prashaw’s narrative are excerpts from Adam’s social media posts, giving us glimpses into the young man’s interior life as he traverses his late teens and early 20s. […]

Book Geeks reviews Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love :

WRITING STYLE: 3.5/5

SUBJECT: 4/5

CANDIDNESS: 4.5/5

RELEVANCE: 3.5/5

ENTERTAINMENT QUOTIENT: 3.5/5

“Eat Pray Love” is so popular that it is almost impossible to not read it. Having felt ashamed many times on my not having read this book, I quietly ordered the book (before I saw the movie) from amazon.in and sat down to read it. I don’t remember what I expected it to be – maybe more like a chick lit thing but it turned out quite different. The book is a real story and is a short journal from the time when its writer went travelling to three different countries in pursuit of three different things – Italy (Pleasure), India (Spirituality), Bali (Balance) and this is what corresponds to the book’s name – EAT (in Italy), PRAY (in India) and LOVE (in Bali, Indonesia). These are also the three Is – ITALY, INDIA, INDONESIA.

Though she had everything a middle-aged American woman can aspire for – MONEY, CAREER, FRIENDS, HUSBAND; Elizabeth was not happy in her life, she wasn’t happy in her marriage. Having suffered a terrible divorce and terrible breakup soon after, Elizabeth was shattered. She didn’t know where to go and what to do – all she knew was that she wanted to run away. So she set out on a weird adventure – she will go to three countries in a year and see if she can find out what she was looking for in life. This book is about that life changing journey that she takes for one whole year. […]

Emily May reviews Michelle Obama’s Becoming on Goodreads:

Look, I'm not a happy crier. I might cry at songs about leaving and missing someone; I might cry at books where things don't work out; I might cry at movies where someone dies. I've just never really understood why people get all choked up over happy, inspirational things. But Michelle Obama's kindness and empathy changed that. This book had me in tears for all the right reasons.

This is not really a book about politics, though political experiences obviously do come into it. It's a shame that some will dismiss this book because of a difference in political opinion, when it is really about a woman's life. About growing up poor and black on the South Side of Chicago; about getting married and struggling to maintain that marriage; about motherhood; about being thrown into an amazing and terrifying position.

I hate words like "inspirational" because they've become so overdone and cheesy, but I just have to say it-- Michelle Obama is an inspiration. I had the privilege of seeing her speak at The Forum in Inglewood, and she is one of the warmest, funniest, smartest, down-to-earth people I have ever seen in this world.

And yes, I know we present what we want the world to see, but I truly do think it's genuine. I think she is someone who really cares about people - especially kids - and wants to give them better lives and opportunities.

She's obviously intelligent, but she also doesn't gussy up her words. She talks straight, with an openness and honesty rarely seen. She's been one of the most powerful women in the world, she's been a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, she's had her own successful career, and yet she has remained throughout that same girl - Michelle Robinson - from a working class family in Chicago.

I don't think there's anyone who wouldn't benefit from reading this book.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better idea of how to write a book review. You might be wondering how to put all of this knowledge into action now! Many book reviewers start out by setting up a book blog. If you don’t have time to research the intricacies of HTML, check out Reedsy Discovery — where you can read indie books for free and review them without going through the hassle of creating a blog. To register as a book reviewer , go here .

And if you’d like to see even more book review examples, simply go to this directory of book review blogs and click on any one of them to see a wealth of good book reviews. Beyond that, it's up to you to pick up a book and pen — and start reviewing!

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Book Reviews

A book review addresses the subject matter of a literary work, and assesses effectiveness and value. Book reviews keep publishers and the public aware of what is being thought and written in a wide range of subjects. When a new book is issued, copies are sent to reviewers; subsequent reviews appear in literary magazines, academic journals, newspapers, and other periodicals. People everywhere depend on book reviews to direct them in their reading; many readers buy what commentators give particular attention. Competent reviewers are the best counselors for readers attempting to keep up with intellectual and aesthetic developments in the literary arts.

Scope: What a Book Review Is and Is Not

Book reviews vary widely. A review does not simply summarize book material, and should not be substituted for the original book. The purpose of a book review is to make known what a literary work purports to do and be, as a publication for both general and specialized readers. Essential components to be taken into account include concerns of subject matter and style. A review is a critical essay, a report and an analysis. Whether favorable or unfavorable in its assessment, it should seem authoritative. The reviewer's competence must be convincing and satisfying. As with any form of writing, the writer of a book review is convincing through thorough study and understanding of the material, and opinions supported by sound reasoning; the reviewer achieves reader satisfaction upon by giving justice to the subject, the book being reviewed, and connecting it with vital human concerns. A review may be limited in its scope due to length requirements, whether those are set by an instructor or an editor. How thoroughly and with respect to what aspects a book is reviewed also depends on instructor or editor preferences, or simply the attitudes and qualifications of the reviewer.

Essential Objectives

A book review should address three issues:

Contents, or what is said in the book.
Style, or how it is said.
Assessment, or analysis of how true and significant the book is.

The most essential preparation for review writing is of course a complete, thoughtful reading of the book. After reading, the reviewer should have a sound, integrated idea of the book contents, and begin to develop attitudes toward style, purpose, and value. As the reviewer forms ideas for the review, certain influences and motives should be considered:

The interests, general or special, of the readers: Are they looking to the review for an elementary, informational report? A more advanced, technical, scholarly address?
The reviewer's own particular interests and purposes: Does the reviewer want to remain primarily a fact-finding reporter? Or are there more specialized ideas and principles of art and ideology the reviewer wants to advance?
Contemporary social, economic, political, and aesthetic issues: Do one or more of these affect the aim or emphasis of the book review? How does the incorporation and interpretation of these issues in the book review further discussion of the book's contents and style?
Required treatment and length requirements: What requirements for the review, emphasis and length, have been set by the instructor or editor?

Material for the Review

As the reviewer decides the scope and content of the review, there are various critical considerations to keep in mind. In addition to content and style, information about the publication and category of the book, and the author and author purpose, may be helpful with analysis. Not all material needs to be included in the final review, but the reviewer should be aware of any relevant issues.

Bibliographical Data

Bibliographical data includes the publisher, place and date of publication, and book price. This information is important for readers who want to buy the book. It may also raise questions: Is the book newly issued? Or is it being reissued? If reissued, is it only a new printing or has it been revised? If revised, what is the nature of the revision? Answers to these questions often can be found in a preface to the book by the author. Consult the front matter of the book, the title and copyright pages, for basic publication information. Often, price, publisher, and page count are listed separately at the beginning or end of a book review; this is the case with the example reviews accompanying this guide.

Classification

There are various categories, or genres, to which a book is assigned: fiction, poetry, travel and adventure, mystery, children's literature, biography, history, and contemporary thought, among others. A reviewer analyzes a book's conformity to a genre with attention to the author's approaches, methods, materials and coverage, and the outcomes of the book as to information, judgments, or interest value. For example, in her review of John D'Agata's Halls of Fame , Wendy Rawlings discusses how D'Agata experiments with the form of the essay: "If you're accustomed to reading essays organized around a clearly articulated theme and guided by a single narrative voice that signposts its intentions along the way, D'Agata's methods may frustrate. His essays are disjunctive agglomerations of excerpts from texts of all sorts (literary and otherwise), lists, transcripts from tape-recorded conversations, and, often, long passages of direct quotes from people he meets . . . Reading D'Agata's essays, I felt the strain of someone experimenting with the democratization of a form that, in America, has perhaps been colonized, or at least overpopulated by the ironic and the smug." Rawlings further compares and contrasts D'Agata's methods to those of David Foster Wallace, another contemporary writer of essays. When analyzing a writer's approach to form, some questions to consider are: How does the book differ from previous works in the same field? Has the author written previous books, in this genre or others? How has the author changed or developed? To what extent does the book being reviewed offer anything new its genre? How might it influence later works in the same genre?

Author and Author Purpose

Depending on the genre of the book, the background and purpose of the author may be relevant to the analysis of the book. Refer to the book jacket and biographical notes on the author. Further research may be helpful; read interviews, essays, and, if available, previously written biographies. In John Calderazzo's review of Ken Lamberton's Wilderness and Razor Wire , biographical data about Lamberton proves relevant: "Lamberton had an uncommon resume for someone doing serious jail time: no grinding poverty, no drugs or violence. He grew up in Arizona as an avid collector of wild things, a self-taught naturalist . . . He earned a bachelor's degree in biology, married Karen, a fellow lover of the wild, had kids, and decided to share his passions for science and nature in the public schools . . . He became infatuated with a student and, incredibly, ran off with her to Colorado. Soon someone from Mesa recognized them in Aspen and called the police." This background information provides the reason for Lamberton's incarceration as well as the basis for Calderazzo's discussion of the writer's "microscopically detailed prose" and "the single-mindedness of his gaze." The following is a list of possible biographical data about an author to reference in a review:

Race, nationality, and origins-social, cultural, religious, economic, political, environmental.
Training and affiliations-literary, scholastic, religious, political, etc.
Schooling, travel, or other formative influences.
Personal experiences-general or specific.
Career and/or professional position.
Other literary or scholastic works.
Stimulus or occasion for writing.
Special writing aids-illustrations, photographs, diagrams, etc.
General attitude-objective/subjective, formal/informal, authoritative/speculative, etc.
Purpose-as described in a preface or other formal statement, or in some key phrase.
Audience-who the writer hopes will read the book.

Subject Matter

The subject of a book is what the book is about, an idea or ideas explored in the book's contents. In a nonfiction book, the subject should be fairly explicit, in the author's own words. With fiction, however, a reviewer must interpret the subject through analysis of character, setting, plot, and symbolism. A discussion of the subject of a book might begin with its title: From where did the author derive the title? What is the title's meaning or suggestiveness? Is the title an adequate heading for the contents of the book? Or is it ambiguous or false in some way? Other questions regarding the exploration of a book's subject by its author include: What areas of the subject are covered? (In fiction, areas of subject may be considered character concerns, setting, and plot.) What areas of the subject are left uncovered? Is this intentional, or the result of oversight or failure, on the author's part? To what degree is the author thorough or negligent in addressing the subject? In his review of Wilderness and Razor Wire , John Calderazzo comments that writer Ken Lamberton avoids discussion of personal motivation: "Perhaps to spare his wife further humiliation and pain, Lamberton has decided not to belabor his motive for his one act of insanity. He talks vaguely of immaturity, but that's about it . . . [T]he single-mindedness of his gaze [has] implications he either doesn't recognize or won't fully discuss . . . Fixating on the near at hand may be a necessary metaphor and an undeniable fact of prison life, a way to cope with an existence that certainly scares the hell out of me. Maybe, though, Lamberton's fierce gaze derives from something he'll always carry within him: this edgy and impulsive but obviously grateful husband who knows he's not free to teach again for a living . . ."

The contents of a book revolve around the subject, and develop one or more central ideas. For nonfiction, a reviewer analyzes how well the contents of a book address the central idea, the strength or weakness of supporting ideas, and the relevancy of collateral ideas or implications. In fiction, themes develop through character, setting, and plot; a reviewer evaluates the relative success or lack thereof of these fictional elements. Think about these questions: What is the setting, or place and time, of the story? Does the setting reflect or contrast with characters and plot? Are characters fully or minimally developed? Does character development increase or deteriorate as the action proceeds? Is the plot sequenced chronologically, or otherwise? Does tension build or deflate as the story progresses? Note how David Milofsky discusses the effectiveness of the contents of Reynolds Price's Noble Norfleet : "Although there are spots of lyricism-and for the first third of the book, Price's narrative has the drive and tension of some of his better work-overall, Noble Norfleet sags beneath its unlikely premise and even more unlikely hero . . . It seems likely that Price was trying to say something here about the relationship between sexuality and madness, about the necessity not only of nursing others but of caring for oneself, of showing Noble as some kind of paradigm, hence his name. But, sadly, the novel succeeds in none of these aims." Remember that details about the plot and characters in a book are revealed by the reviewer only to support the purpose of the review. Certainly, a review should not give away a book's ending, nor should it be a simple summary of events and characters. The reviewer's job is not only to report highlights but also to respond to the ideas and techniques evident in the book.

Style refers to how an author relates content through writing. This is an important aspect of a book to review. While initially reading the book, and in any subsequent reads, a reviewer should mark passages of particular resonance and reflection of the author's style. These passages help the reviewer form ideas as to whether or not the style is effective in conveying content, and pleasing to the reader. One or more of these passages may be cited within the review itself in order to both exemplify the author's style and provide basis for the reviewer's response. The following is excerpted from Wendy Rawlings' discussion of John D'Agata's poetic, associative essay-writing style in Halls of Fame: "Juxtaposing so many voices and kinds of language . . . can allow the reader to create exciting associative links between texts and ideas, but it can also, when overused, begin to feel somewhat arbitrary. In the book's title essay, for instance, single sentences and sentence fragments form choppy narratives composed of statements that seem, at times, cruelly separated from each other by the portentous silence of white space. This narrative strategy prevails throughout most of the twenty-four sections of the essay, and as a result, the sentences take on a stilted self-importance, like a poem written by someone as yet unschooled in enjambment." A passage from the essay follows this description. When responding to a literary work, consider these aspects of style:

Logical and reasoned (objective), or imagined and emotional (subjective).
Dramatic and gripping, or pedestrian and level.
Epic and far-reaching, or lyrical and infused with personal poetic emotion.
Solemn and serious, or comic and entertaining.
Spiritual or vulgar or both.
Formal, or familiar, informal.
Simple, or complex.
Broad, or specific.
Abstract, or concrete.
Direct, or implicational.
Figurative, or literal.
Use of detail, sense appeal-the look, sound, smell, taste, feel.
Balance, parallelism, and contrast of exposition, scene, and dialogue.
Allusions, quotations, aphorisms, etc.
To the subject.
To the purpose of the author.
To the reader.

Form and Technique

An author carefully chooses the form and various writing techniques to use to develop ideas. A book reviewer decides whether or not these choices are appropriate and effective. Do certain techniques aid or impede the author's purpose? What passages from the book best exemplify these techniques?

Form and Technique in Nonfiction

Use of source material and authority.
Use of definition; illustrations and examples; comparison and contrast; cause and effect.
Use of generalization and subsequent conclusions.
Tone; authority; approach to subject and audience.
Degree of convincingness.
Worth of proposal; practicality; need.
Comparison with other possible policies.
Costs or difficulties involved.
Ultimate promise, solution, or plan
Methods of deduction or induction.
Synthesis; formation of separate elements into a coherent whole.
Syllogism; major premise, minor premise, and conclusion.
Dialectics; arrival at truth through conversation involving question and answer.
Casuistry; determination of right and wrong by applying generalized ethics principles.
Fallacy; begging the question, ignoring the question, etc.

Form and Technique in Fiction

Dominant impression; vividness of final impression.
Selection of details to support a single effect.
Appeal to sight, sound, smell, taste, and feel; imagery.
Directness; implication and suggestion.
Point of view; first, second, third; limited or omniscient.
Establishment of setting.
Smoothness of transitions in time sequence.
Use of flashback.
How presented or introduced.
Motivations; sources for feeling and/or drives to action.
How described; direct or implied; revealed through description or dialogue.
Purposes; heroic or villainous; tragic inner flaws; revealing traits.
How credible and consistent.
Opening situation and/or conflict.
Obstacles and complications.
Tension and suspense.
Turning point, or climax.
Resolution.
Degree of inventiveness and/or plausibility.
Final philosophy or view of life derived from characters and action.

Depending on the author's purpose, a book's realism, or truth to life, may need assessment. If a book of fiction is meant to be realistic fiction-is it? Is it logical, natural, plausible? To what extent does the author rely on coincidence or accident to propel the plot? Is there adequate evidence of character motivation? Or a lack of sufficient urges and drives? Is the story infused with a quality of normalcy, or abnormality? Remember, if a book of fiction is to be successful according to a reviewer, it is not necessarily realistic fiction; a book's realism, or lack thereof, need be addressed by a reviewer only as it compares to the author's intention for the story. See here how David Milofsky addresses the realism of William Trevor's novel The Story of Lucy Gault : "It seems unlikely, to say the least, that longtime residents of a place (going back several generations, we're told) would cut off contact so completely as the Gaults do, but, of course, if this isn't the case there would be no novel. Similarly, it's hard to believe that the lawyer wouldn't be able to contrive a way to contact the absent parents . . . It's a tribute to Trevor's genius that these objections are largely overridden and storytelling takes over."

Form and Technique in Poetry

Received (given) forms; sonnet, quatrain, villanelle, sestina, haiku, etc.
Free verse forms.
Lyric; narrative; dramatic; prose; ballad (folk, literary, popular).
Point of view; persona or apparently personal.
Dramatic monologue.
Tone; irony, satire, etc.
Intensity, atmosphere, mood.
Concrete or abstract.
Denotation, connotation, implication.
Vulgar, colloquial/informal, formal.
Syntax, or sentence structure.
Amount and type of sensory detail.
Metaphor; simile; personification; allusion.
Synesthesia; describing a sense impression using words that normally describe another.
Hyperbole or understatement.
Metonymy; substituting one word/phrase for another, closely associated word/phrase.
Synecdoche; using a part to refer to the whole, or the whole to refer to a part.
Alliteration; repetition of an initial sound in two or more words of a phrase.
Assonance (repetition of vowels) and/or consonance (repetition of consonants).
Onomatopoeia; using a word that is defined through both its sound and meaning.
Euphony (smooth, pleasant sound) vs. cacophony (rough, harsh sound).
Rhythm (pattern of beats in a stream of sound)-appeals t
The line; end-stopped (self-enclosed) or enjambed.
Feet; iambs, trochees, anapests, dactylics, etc.
Meter; mono-, di-, tri-, tetra-, penta-, hexa-, etc.
Repetition.
Rhyme (corresponding terminal sounds)-appeals t
True; words sound nearly identical and rhyme on one stressed syllable.
Slant (near/off); words do not exactly rhyme, but almost rhyme.
End rhyme (at end of line) and/or internal rhyme (similar sounds within one line).
Masculine (lines end w/ stressed syllable); feminine (lines end w/ unstressed syllable).

View of Life

It is common for an author to express a view of life through ideas and themes developed in a book. A reviewer identifies and comments on the author's stance. Does the book hold to and/or further develop views apparent in past works? Or make a new statement? Below is a list of popular attitudes, or schools of thought:

Idealism-emphasis on enduring spirituality as opposed to transient values of materialism.
Romanticism-focus on emotion and imagination as freedom from the strictly logical.
Classicism-intellectuality; dominance of the whole over its parts, and form over impulse.
Realism-adherence to actualities, the logistics of everyday life; objectivity.
Impressionism-intuition; sense responses to aesthetic objects.
Naturalism-humans as part of nature; adaption to external environment.

In response to Wilderness and Razor Wire , John Calderazzo discusses the importance of nature in Ken Lamberton's life and writing: "[I]n the prison of his days (to paraphrase W. H. Auden), Lamberton is helped . . . by nature, by the winds and dust and sweet-smelling raindrops that blow down from the nearby mountains, which he sees framed in barbed wire. This is nature unbound, not just out there beyond the walls but slipping in through the bars, swirling around his cell, penetrating even his skin . . . [Swallows] migrate, then return to raise new young in their mud-packed homes, lending solace-and spice-to the impossibly slow turning of the seasons . . . The swallows and many other break-ins from the natural world are also resources of rehabilitation, which Lamberton says is absent from all other aspects of prison life." If comparisons are to be made between a book being reviewed and its predecessors, a reviewer should be familiar with the basic forms and techniques prevalent in works expressing similar viewpoints. Further research and reading are necessary for the reviewer to form intelligent analysis of views of life expressed through writing.

Value and Significance

Often a book review comments on the significance of a new work. This value may be measured in relation to other books in the same genre, works addressing the same subject matter, past and contemporary authors with a similar style, and/or previous works by the same author. In his review of William Trevor's The Story of Lucy Gault , David Milofsky compares the novel to Trevor's past works, and comments on its place in literature in general: "[Trevor]'s been called the Irish Chekhov, but that's not really adequate, since Chekhov never really wrote novels. The truth is that Trevor is sui generis, in a class by himself. While his stories (collected a few years ago in an omnibus volume) are brilliant, novels like The Old Boys and Felicia's Journey are lasting contributions to our literature. He's a literary treasure and never less than interesting reading . . . The Story of Lucy Gault may not be the most accomplished novel of Trevor's distinguished career, but that still places it far beyond most of the fiction that will be written in English this year. It's highly recommended reading." Value is also determined by the universality of application-how and to whom the work applies. Are the book's contents of universal interest? Or does the subject matter limit the book's appeal to a narrow field of individuals? Determining the value and significance of a book depends largely on the knowledge and subjectivity of the reviewer; familiarity with comparable books and authors is required to draw conclusions of this nature.

A book's format, or physical make-up, reflects the ideas of both its author and its publisher. A book reviewer might mention characteristics of format, in relation to suitability and aesthetics. Is the book's size convenient? Is the binding durable? Is the print type legible? Do illustrations, diagrams, and maps, if any, aid the reader's understanding of the material? Is the index correct and complete? Are bibliographies and reference lists present? In response to artwork present in Ken Lamberton's Wilderness and Razor Wire , John Calderazzo comments on both the exactness of the drawings and the possible meaning of this detail-orientedness to Lamberton's life: "[J]ournal entries and small essays [are] complemented by drawings of tarantulas, conenose beetles, horned lizards, and other desert creatures in almost photo-realistic close-up. This is why I suggested that Lamberton may not find himself any closer to 'nature' when he's finally free. How can he get more intimate? . . . All of his drawings, in fact, are rendered in extreme close-up, like visual infatuations writ large. Nothing seems to exist in the distance, which makes me wonder if anything ever does for Lamberton, or ever will."

Planning and Writing

A book review should meet the requirements of any good composition. Clarity, correctness, readability, and interest are very important. A review should give its readers not only an understanding of the reviewer's intellectual response to a book but also an awareness of the basis for this response, through example and analysis. Specific passages from the book are used to exemplify the reviewer's points regarding elements of style, form, and technique. There is no strict pattern for writing book reviews. Guiding the book reviewer's writing process, however, are the three essential objectives of relating what is said in the book, how it is said, and how true and significant it is. As with the planning of a composition, make a list of possible material to use in the review-ideas, responses, information, examples. Study this material to decide what to include in the book review and what proves extraneous. Put the items to include in a suitable order-for instance, from greater to lesser importance. Once the material is organized, a controlling idea for the review emerges; this controlling idea may form the topic sentence of the review, and provides guidance for achieving coherence and focus throughout. Use the topic sentence, in varied forms, in the beginning and end of the review. Once the book reviewer has chosen the proper and adequate material, organized this material effectively, and decided on the main idea and focus to be developed, it is time to write the review.

Like writing the introduction of a composition, there several possible strategies to use for beginning a book review. One type of strategic beginning is prompt definition-assigning meaning to terms in the title of the book, for example, or giving the scope of the review as it relates to the subject and the reviewer's response to the book. Another effective approach is to highlight the origins and past history of the subject treated in the book; this technique may also be used to introduce ideas about genre, style, or view of life, depending on what the reviewer has chosen as the focus of the review. A statement of exclusion shows what will not be addressed in a review and focuses attention on what really will be discussed. At the beginning of his review of Reynold Price's Noble Norfleet , David Milofsky uses a comparison between Price's newest novel and his previous works: "It would be nice to report that Reynolds Price, the distinguished author of more than thirty books, including A Long and Happy Life and Surface of Earth , has added significantly to his oeuvre with his new novel, but such is not the case. Not by a long shot." A reviewer might also quickly catch reader attention by appealing to human interest-perhaps a personal reference or brief anecdote. The anecdote should connect to or exemplify the main focus of the book review. Note the anecdotal technique Wendy Rawlings uses in the introduction of her review of John D'Agata's Halls of Fame : "While on a recent trip to England, I witnessed a cultural exchange that struck me as emblematic of John D'Agata's book of essays, Halls of Fame . An American friend who has spent the past year tolerating a chilly flat in a London suburb for the sake of his British fiancée wanted me to guess the height of the World's Largest Pencil. 'I don't know-eight, nine feet tall?' I said. 'See? See? I knew it!' my friend shouted. He explained that when asked the same question, an English friend had guessed the height of the world's largest pencil to be 'perhaps a foot high, or two.' His modest expectations compared to my great ones (I could not but visualize the World's Largest Pencil as at least a foot taller than an NBA All-Star) represented to my friend something essential about the differences between British and American sensibilities."

Development

The primary focus of a book review is supplied in the beginning paragraph. After this main idea is established, it needs to be developed and justified. Using an organized list of material, the reviewer details the reasons behind the response to the book. References to past history, causes and effects, comparisons and contrasts, and specific passages from the book help illustrate and exemplify this main idea. Personal philosophy and moralization should be kept to a minimum, if included at all; the reader of a book review is interested in unbiased, thoughtful, reasonable, and well-developed ideas pertaining to the book in question. The bulk of a review consists of the development of the reviewer's main idea, the response to the book and the reasons for it. In each of the example reviews that accompany this guide, the reviewers develop their ideas through references to comparable past and contemporary works, analysis of aspects of form and technique, and inclusion of notable passages from the books being reviewed.

Conclusions

The conclusion reflects the focus of the rest of the review, and leaves the reader with a clearly articulated, well-justified final assessment. A restatement of the topic sentence is better than a cursory inspection of less important matters like book format and mechanical make-up. Main emphasis should remain primarily on the qualities and materials of the book being reviewed. At the end of Wendy Rawlings' review of John D'Agata's Halls of Fame , Rawlings summarizes previously stated ideas: "When D'Agata doesn't find the balance, the lyricism borrowed from poetry seems not quite, yet, to fit. I don't wish for D'Agata to join the legions of the smug and ironic, but at certain moments, I begin to wish for authorial presence that will assert itself less forcefully in terms of the arrangement of words on the page, which are often blasted into squadrons separated by asterisks, white space, or unhelpful section headings, and more forcefully on the level of the sentence, as D'Agata does in 'Notes toward the making of a whole human being . . . ,' a five-page essay composed of a single, breathtakingly constructed sentence." The conclusion statement cements the reviewer's recommendation, or lack thereof, of the book. Clearly, this is David Milofsky's aim in the conclusion of his review of Reynold Price's Noble Norfleet : "Even with a failure, it is interesting to read as accomplished a writer as Price, but his new novel cannot be recommended on any other grounds." The final sentence of a review should be both memorable and thought-provoking to the reader. As at the end of John Calderazzo's review of Ken Lamberton's Wilderness and Razor Wire , this final thought might be put in the form of a question: "[R]eading about Lamberton's flawed but exhilarating life makes me wonder about temptation and impetuousness. In light of losing everything, how many of us are still tempted to pursue, just once, some nearby object of desire? And will this constant risk be the prison of all of our days, our lives a landscape of wilderness and razor wire?"

Reviewing Specific Types of Books

The type of book being reviewed raises special considerations as to how to approach the review. Information specific to the categories of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry can be found under the "Form and Technique" heading of this guide. Below are further questions to consider, based on a book's category:

Does the book give a full-length picture of the subject? Focus on only a portion of life?
What phases of the subject's life receive greatest space? Is there justification for this?
What is the point of view of the author?
Are idiosyncrasies and weaknesses omitted? Treated adequately? Overplayed?
Does the author endeavor to get at hidden motives?
What important new facts about the subject's life are revealed in the book?
Is the subject of the biography still living?
What source materials were used in the preparation of the book?
What training has the author had for this kind of work?
What particular historical period does the book address?
Is the accound given in broad outline, or in detail?
Is the style that of reportorial writing, or is there an effort at interpretation?
Is emphasis on traditional matter, like wars, kings, etc.? Or is it a social history?
Are dates used extensively and/or intelligently?
Is the book likely to be out of date soon? Or is it intended to stand the test of time?
Are maps, illustrations, charts, etc., helpful to the reader?
o Who is the author, and what right does he/she have to be writing on the subject? o What contributions to knowledge and understanding are made by the book?
Is the author credible? What is the author's purpose for writing the book?
Does the book contribute to knowledge of geography, government, folklore, etc.?
Does the book have news value?
How effective are plot, pace, style, and characterization? Strengths? Weaknesses?
Is the ending worthwhile? Predictable?
o Children's Literature
o What is the age/interest group for which the book is intended?
o What is the overall experience/feeling of reading the book?
o Is the book illustrated? How? By whom?

Publication

There is a good market for the newcomer in book reviewing. Many editors, including those of big-name magazines, do not like to use the same reviewer too often, and this means unknown, unpublished reviewers have good opportunities to break into the field. Send query letters to editors to find out what their publication needs are. Try smaller, special-interest publications first (ethnic, feminist, religious, etc.); if the reviewer has knowledge or affiliation relevant to the publication, it may increase the chances of a positive response from the editor. Stay current with new books, and read other book reviews. Once an assignment for a review is given, produce timely, quality work, specific to requirements set by the editor. Build publication credits with a variety of periodicals; pursue possibilities of starting a regular column for a single newspaper or magazine. Book reviewing is not generally a highly profitable venture, but money can be made, depending on a reviewer's qualifications, reputation, and dedication to the field.

Cress, Janell. (2003). Book Reviews. Writing@CSU . Colorado State University. https://writing.colostate.edu/guides/guide.cfm?guideid=49

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Percival Everett Can’t Say What His Novels Mean

By Maya Binyam

Percival Everett photographed by Tracy Nguyen for The New Yorker.

In a narrow, windowless room at the University of Southern California, a group of graduate students is workshopping a short story. Its author is silent as her classmates deliver gentle feedback. Some suggest minor improvements of pacing, setting, and tone. One student would appreciate a more robust description of the protagonist’s emotions, but enjoys the sparseness, too. “I like this version,” another adds. “I don’t think I have much in the way of critique.”

While they speak, their professor, the novelist Percival Everett, sits quietly at the head of a too-large table, one palm steadied against it, his body swivelling almost imperceptibly from side to side. His head, decorated with errant coils of dark gray hair, is framed by a gargantuan television that hangs behind him, its screen a black expanse. He wears the uniform of a professional Everyman: slacks, button-down, glasses. He talks at a low volume, but the sounds he makes have the electric quality of speech being filtered through a mike.

“I think you guys must be a whole lot smarter than me,” he says, pushing his glasses to his forehead. “Because I’m just a dumb old cowboy, and I can’t figure out what’s going on.”

Everett, who is sixty-seven, deploys negative hyperbole with abandon, especially when describing the capacities of his own mind. He has published two dozen novels, four collections of short stories, six collections of poetry, and one book for children, all of which he summarily casts off as “shit.” “I’m pretty sure everything I’m writing is shit,” he told me the first time we met. “I’m just trying to make the best shit I can.” After a few meetings, he seemed worried that his shit would become mine, too. “You don’t have to read all this shit,” he said. And: “Do you always get the shit assignments?”

Everett is American literature’s philosopher king—and its sharpest satirist. The significant insignificance of language has long been a preoccupation of his fiction, which plumbs the failures of storytelling to capture (or enhance) the experience of life. In “Dr. No,” a gonzo spy thriller from 2022, a scholar who specializes in “nothing” learns his most important lesson from his one-legged dog: “What Trigo had taught me was that pure meaning did not exist, never did and never would.” Other protagonists, among them a Derrida-obsessed baby, a philandering painter, and a down-and-out gambler, take for granted that meaning-making is a dance of false promises and willful delusions. Everett himself compares it to a con: “Because we want language to mean something, it means everything.”

In class, discussion turns into a debate about whether artificial intelligence can improve a writer’s craft.

“It has no ideas!” Everett exclaims.

“Well, if you go into ChatGPT and you’re, like, ‘Write me a story about a guy who goes to a writing institute to write a novel,’ it’ll make you a story,” a student replies. “So it has some ideas.”

Everett’s brow relaxes, his voice suddenly chipper. “Did I ever tell you about John Searle’s Chinese-room thought experiment?” he asks. The students are quiet. “Imagine that I’m in a room,” he says. “I have two windows. Through one window, I receive a character. I have a vast array of characters in front of me. Through trial and error, I learn that when I receive this character, I put out that one, until I learn that when I get this message, I put out that message. I can become perfect at that. But what have I not learned?”

The students remain silent. When Everett talks again, it’s with a mischievous, satisfied smile.

“How to speak Chinese,” he says.

Everett’s fiction frequently mystifies critics, who excuse their mystification by describing his work as confounding. His novels often make fun of genres, or else invent them. He has written Westerns, thrillers, a novella in the style of a Lifetime movie, and a handbook for the management of slaves. One novel might even appear in another as an object of ridicule. “Erasure,” Everett’s 2001 satire of the publishing industry, shows up in “I Am Not Sidney Poitier,” published eight years later, when a character named Ted Turner, a founder of CNN, recognizes its author. “I didn’t like it,” Turner tells the author character, named Percival Everett. “Nor I,” Everett says. “I didn’t like writing it, and I didn’t like it when I was done with it.”

There is no single style or subject that unites Everett’s novels, but many of them feature one of two psychological settings. There are the cerebral books, the ones in which his passion for philosophy acts as a narrative engine as powerful as plot. And then there are the realist books, many of them set in the American West. The latter are no less uncanny than the former; they seem only to be drawing on a more embodied experience of life. They fixate on the cruelty of humanity, yet manage to light on its potential for love.

My first meeting with Everett was at a restaurant in South Pasadena, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Danzy Senna, and their two teen-age sons. I arrived with a long list of questions about his newest novel, “James,” a retelling of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” The book—which is narrated by Jim, a young father enslaved by one of Huck’s guardians—seemed to fuse Everett’s interests: Jim travels the Mississippi but has an imaginary argument with Voltaire. Unlike Twain’s Jim, who can’t read or write, Everett’s Jim displays an unwavering control of language, which he deploys as a means of both disguise and self-expression. Under the cover of night, he offers enslaved children lessons in translation—“Would you like for me to get some sand?” becomes “Oh, Lawd, missums ma’am, you wan fo me to gets some sand?”—so that the enslavers can feel secure in their station. But, once on the run, Jim begins to pen a narrative of his own. “My interest is in how these marks that I am scratching on this page can mean anything at all,” he writes. “If they can have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning.”

Everett answered my first few questions politely, if briefly, but I quickly began to feel like a lawyer at an unsuccessful deposition. He told me that he didn’t remember when he began writing “James,” or when he finished it, only that he wrote it while watching episodes of Bruce Geller’s “Mission: Impossible.” He knew that he first read “Huck Finn” as a child, and that the version he read was abridged, but he didn’t remember if he liked it, disliked it, or had any reaction to it at all. Before writing “James,” he reread “Huck Finn” fifteen times. Now, he said, it was a “blur.”

Books, either written or read, are conventionally understood to be pathways to knowledge. But Everett claims to suffer from “work amnesia”; after publishing a book, he forgets its contents entirely.

“I hate the idea that I might know something,” he told me during lunch.

“But other people celebrate you for knowing things,” I countered, trying to justify our convergence over poached eggs and coffee.

“I know nothing,” he said. “Why are you asking me questions?”

I knew that Everett knew something, but I wasn’t sure if his insistence otherwise was a mark of false humility or the admission of an aspiration. He has often articulated his desire to write an “abstract novel,” a book that is about nothing but language in the same way that an abstract painting is about nothing but paint. But language, unlike paint, never exists on its own. Words on a page will always conjure people, objects, and feelings from life, and so a reader will always expect them to act as representations.

Everett’s project is bound to fail; he uses that failure as material. He doesn’t try to make words work beyond their capacities—he simply exploits those capacities, so that his readers are forced to question their expectations. He has cited Ralph, the mute baby-genius narrator of “Glyph” (1999), as having a voice “closest” to his own. Ralph spends his days reading semiotic theory, and sometimes writing notes in crayon, knowing they’ll be studied for glimmers of revelation. Before being kidnapped by his pediatrician, and then by the Pentagon, he issues a warning. “Attempts at filling in my articulatory gaps with a kind of subtext, though it might prove an amusing exercise, will uncover nothing,” he says. “At the risk of sounding cocky, my gaps are not gaps at all, but are already full, and all my meaning is surface.”

When asked if an interpretation was his intention, Everett almost always says yes. He knows that his books depend on an audience to achieve significance, and he seems to encourage that dependence. In 2020, he published three versions of his novel “Telephone,” a move that he knew would emphasize the authority of his readers—and piss them off. (The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.) “He plays with the reader,” his longtime editor, Fiona McCrae, told me. “Part of his subject is our reaction to his work.”

Because Everett refuses to analyze his fiction, he is popularly regarded as a “difficult” author, a distinction he wears with pride. “I am a famously difficult interview,” he told me more than once. He acknowledges that he can be spacey when his interest isn’t held, and he often splices amusing non sequiturs into conversation. (“If you were going to be an animal, which animal would you be?” “Do you think there’s a Sasquatch?”) He believes that awards are “offensive,” and describes them as “invidious comparisons of works of art.” His books have won many. “I’ve never met somebody who gives less of a shit,” the director Cord Jefferson, who recently adapted “Erasure” into an Oscar-nominated film, “American Fiction,” told me.

Everett’s U.S.C. class typically meets at a restaurant near his home. When I visited, it had convened on campus because Everett was scheduled to attend what he described as “some event.” It was a celebration of his recent induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. “My god, this thing is killing me,” he texted me from the luncheon.

On a clear morning in early November, I waited for Everett in his office. Through the window, downtown Los Angeles looked like a collage: the skyscrapers seemed to have been cut away from the city and pressed against the country. On Everett’s desk were a picture of a stick figure labelled “ DADDY ,” drawn by one of his sons; a puppet of Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan dictator, given to him by a friend; and a wooden horse figurine, sent to him by a Chinese translator.

Everett walked through the door bearing a letter. “I can’t make sense of it,” he complained, handling the envelope as if it were cursed. But when he settled into his chair and read the letter aloud it seemed entirely straightforward. An editor was asking him to contribute a piece of short criticism to a new publication. In terms of subject matter, the editor believed he would have much to choose from—there was, as the letter put it, “a boatload of African American fiction coming out this season.”

“Well, that’s a bad metaphor,” I said.

Everett didn’t miss a beat. “Right now, it’s somewhere in the Middle Passage,” he said.

For Everett, “African American fiction” is a commodity posing as a genre. In 1991, when he was perhaps more amenable to performing the duties of his profession, he published an essay on the state of American authorship. “We are at the economic mercy of a market which seeks to affirm its beliefs about African-Americans,” he wrote. In the years since, his work has been celebrated for refusing to provide that affirmation, for enabling Black characters to escape the archetypes—the slave, the Glock star, the welfare queen—to which they’ve been confined. And yet Everett knows that the only way out is in. The essay continued, “Even when our work seeks to be something else, it is a reaction to the position in which we and our works have been placed.”

Everett writes quickly, the reception of one book often seeming to forge the conceit of the next. According to him, when Norman Lear, who died last year, attempted to adapt his début novel, “Suder,” into a feature film, Lear suggested that its Black protagonist be played by a white actor. Everett went on to write two novels in which the protagonist’s race is unspecified. (The film was never made.) He read a review of the first—a novel about a Vietnam veteran who befriends a one-legged sheep farmer—that criticized him for failing to adequately represent “black life.” A decade later, he wrote a novel about a mid-career novelist who pens a parody that turns “black life” into a bite-size monolith, available for popular consumption.

It was 1996. Everett was visiting the poet Cornelius Eady, who had just received a copy of “Push,” by Sapphire. Everett read the book overnight. “I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my fahver,” the narrator, an illiterate teen-ager who is pregnant for the second time with her father’s child (the first one has “Down Sinder”), announces. The book, praised widely for its “gritty realism,” didn’t enrage Everett until he learned that its paperback rights had just sold for an exorbitant amount of money. In the back of Eady’s car, Everett thought up the first line of the novel-within-a-novel that cleaves “Erasure”: “Mama look at me and Tardreece and she call us ‘human slough.’ ”

“Erasure” ’s protagonist is a middle-aged writer named Thelonious (Monk) Ellison. Monk lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature and writes novels that are recognized for their accomplishment, but never for their revelations. (One is a cerebral reworking of a Greek tragedy, similar to Everett’s “Frenzy.”) As a collection, they fail to satisfy the market; editors, passing on Monk’s latest manuscript, complain that it is not “black enough,” even as bookstores shelve his back catalogue under “African American Studies.” “I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression,” he reflects.

Monk believes that his obscurity safeguards his artistic integrity. But when he encounters the latest literary sensation, “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto,” a début novel written by an Oberlin graduate who once spent two days in Harlem, he has a fit of inspiration and writes a minstrel tale of his own. The novel, published under a pen name and narrated by an adolescent rapist on the run from his baby mamas and, later, the L.A.P.D., is called “My Pafology.” After it sells for six hundred thousand dollars, Monk gives it a new title: “Fuck.” Monk hates the book, believing it racist. But his mother’s Alzheimer’s is rapidly progressing, his brother is in the wake of an expensive divorce, and his sister, an abortion provider, has just been killed by pro-life fanatics. He takes the check.

Since its publication, “Erasure” has been conventionally read as an argument for the celebration of intra-racial diversity. Monk’s mother’s disease, his sister’s death, his romance with a woman who owns a beach house near his—“these issues have little or nothing to do with race,” a recent reflection on the novel, published in the Times , declared. “And their existence proves the point that Monk has been trying to make all along—that his ‘Black experience’ is just as representative as anyone’s.” But “Erasure” doesn’t tell the story of an author who successfully defies (and therefore expands) expectations for the kinds of narrative that get called “representative”; it tells the story of an author who, believing the representational claims of literature to be a farce, creates his own farcical doppelgänger, a racial double that guarantees his legibility just as swiftly as it insures his annihilation.

Although Everett is quick to disavow his ego, he is just as quick to create its simulacra: his protagonists share his preoccupations and revisit his memories. One day, over coffee, Everett began talking about his mother.

“I drove a Jeep, the oldest Jeep Cherokee you could imagine,” he said. “It would kill her to call it a truck. I’d call it a truck, and she’d say, ‘You mean your station wagon.’ ”

“This is in ‘Erasure,’ ” I responded.

“I don’t think so,” Everett said. “But I don’t remember. You’re scaring me.”

TITLE The Reason Jesus Hidden Yeas Were Hidden

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Indeed, Monk tells the same story in the novel’s first paragraph, after he identifies himself reluctantly as a writer and, more proudly, as a “son, a brother, a fisherman, an art lover, a woodworker.” Everett himself is an accomplished abstract painter; he has also worked as a jazz guitarist, a horse trainer, a tracker, and a cowboy. “If there is an actual Dos Equis man,” the novelist Chris Abani told me, “Percival is him.”

Distortion animates all writing, but it is sanctioned only in fiction. “I hate this nonfiction shit that’s out in the world,” Everett once told an interviewer. (“If you’re writing memoirs,” he continued, your mother “ought to beat you with a two-by-four.”) During our conversations, he sometimes seemed as though he was laboring to forget my task, or else to divert it. “Are you sure you aren’t my kid?” he asked during our second meeting, over breakfast at Hollywood’s Soho House. We finished eating, and Everett squinted in my direction. “Do you play tennis?” he asked. “I’m looking for a tennis partner.” We began to say goodbye. “You don’t have to write the profile,” he said as we walked toward our cars. “We could just be friends.”

And yet there were just as many moments when Everett seemed open to the duplicity involved in biographical journalism—titillated, even, by the idea of participating in it. One morning, driving to the San Gabriel Mountains, we passed Santa Anita Park, a Thoroughbred racetrack. “We should create an entire persona for me where I go gamble,” Everett said, beginning to mimic the frenzied anticipation of a racegoer. He beat the steering wheel, adjusted his pitch: “Come on, Cinderella’s Dream, come on!”

Everett grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, in a sprawling, forty-five-hundred-square-foot home built by his grandfather. His grandfather, the son of a former slave, was a doctor. His father was a doctor. His sister would become a doctor, too. Everett finds the largeness of his childhood home “embarrassing,” the preponderance of doctors “weird.” He describes his youth as “uneventful.” He attended segregated schools until he was in junior high, but, when I asked about his experience of integration, he just said that he “apparently played the flute.” At home, he spent hours reading Kurt Vonnegut and looking at maps. He took for granted that he would leave South Carolina, but did not feel for it any special dislike.

When Everett spoke to me about his home state, his tone was disaffected. But when I encountered that state in an old bit of memoir, the genre he claims to disdain, it was cast in the white-hot language of dissidence. In a two-page-long sketch titled “Why I’m from Texas,” from 2001, Everett describes South Carolina’s population as “neanderthal, pathetically under-educated, confederate-clad, so-called descendants of pathetically under-educated cannon fodder of the middle 19th century.” In “I Am Not Sidney Poitier,” the protagonist is arrested and put on a prison bus, which carries him through Georgia, where Everett was born. “There was absolutely nothing and no one there of any value,” he observes, glancing out the window. “It was a terrestrial black hole, rather white hole, a kind of giant Caucasian anus that only sucked, yet smelled like a fart.”

For Everett, geography is a tool of intervention and manipulation. “You always add an element to a story once you locate it someplace,” he has said. “It might shape the characters. It might also shape the expectations of the readers, and that’s as much fun to play with as the characters.” In “The Appropriation of Cultures,” a short story from 1996, Daniel, a Black graduate of Brown University, where Everett received his master’s in fiction, returns to his home town of Columbia, South Carolina, to occupy the house left to him by his late mother. He spends his days reading and his nights playing jazz guitar at a club. One evening, a group of drunk white fraternity brothers heckles him from the audience; they’d like him to play “Dixie,” the Confederacy’s unofficial anthem. They intend the request as a cruel joke, but when Daniel begins to play, squeezing out the melody he grew up hating, he finds that he means what he sings: In Dixie Land, I’ll take my stand to live and die in Dixie . His performance comes straight from the heart. The fraternity brothers storm out, and Daniel realizes that “he liked the song, wanted to play it again, knew that he would.”

Over lunch, Everett called “Dixie”—which was written, in 1859, by Daniel Decatur Emmett, the founder of an infamous blackface minstrel troupe—a “Black anthem.” (The troupe makes an appearance in “James,” when Emmett, admiring Jim’s tenor, buys him off a blacksmith.) After Daniel’s performance, he acquires a beat-up pickup truck with a Confederate-flag decal on the rear window. “I’ve decided that the rebel flag is my flag,” he tells a friend. “My blood is southern blood, right?” He sings “Dixie” at a banquet of Black doctors, and soon Black people across South Carolina sport the Confederate flag on their lapels and cars. Having become a symbol of Black power, the flag suddenly disappears from the state capitol: “There was no ceremony, no notice. One day, it was not there.”

When Everett was sixteen, he enrolled at the University of Miami, where he studied philosophy. To pay for his classes, he played jazz guitar in clubs and wrote other students’ term papers. One summer, he drove his lime-green Fiat west. From Florida, he took Interstate 10 through Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, and New Mexico. When he reached the canyon lands in Arizona, he was angry. He hated that he had already encountered the landscape in photographs, that his ability to see what was in front of him had been tarnished by replicas. And yet even that corroded image spun in him a new belief, as old as America: the West was his.

Everett has described this journey as a cosmic inevitability. “All things move from east to west,” he once said. “The sun does, and so should we.” He has spent much of his adult life in New Mexico, California, Wyoming, and Oregon, where he began a Ph.D. program in language philosophy and—before dropping out—started working on a ranch. While bottle-feeding a lamb, Everett watched sheep wander the green hills of the pasture, and thought of the crowds in Miami. He started to cry.

Many of Everett’s characters believe that the West is a place, not a parable. For John Hunt, the horse trainer who narrates “Wounded” (2005), the desert is a desert. “It was dramatic land, dry, remote, wild,” he reflects. “It was why I loved the West. I had no affection necessarily for the history of the people and certainly none for the mythic West, the West that never existed.” But these men also insist that the West serve as an escape: a quintessential American destination without the social trappings of America. In “Watershed” (1996), a hydrologist named Robert Hawks flees his girlfriend for the plains of Colorado, a landscape that insures his “complete removal”:

I considered how I had done so much to remove all things political from my life. . . . I didn’t talk about politics, didn’t respond to talk about politics, didn’t care about what I read in the papers, and didn’t feel any guilt about my lack of participation in those issues of social importance. I did not know or associate with many black people. As it was, I didn’t associate with many people at all, trying at most turns to avoid humans. . . . I didn’t believe in god, I didn’t believe in race, and I especially didn’t believe in America. I simply didn’t care, wouldn’t care, refused to care.

Everett describes people as “worse than anybody,” and his frontiersmen share his misanthropy: they believe that transcendence occurs in the wild, where no one is watching. But, slowly, the landscapes that enable their seclusion begin to bear the marks of the politics they’ve disavowed. In “Wounded,” Hunt finds two coyote pups in the remains of a fire, nurses one back to health, and eventually seeks revenge on the culprits, a band of hillbillies whom he suspects of kidnapping his gay ranch hand. In “Watershed,” a creek that flows onto a reservation is poisoned with anthrax. A group of Native insurgents requires Hawks’s expertise, and, by the novel’s end, he’s become a crucial agent in a movement against the F.B.I.: water, he discovers, may be a natural element, but it’s also an inalienable right. In the story that these men tell about the West, their extreme capability is proof that they are meant to live alone. But, in the real West, that capability is a calling: it forces them to play the hero.

In 1992, Everett bought a ranch in the Banning Pass, between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, where he grew more than a hundred varieties of roses and tended to horses, donkeys, and mules. Neighbors were always bringing injured animals to his doorstep. One day, he found a baby crow that had fallen out of a tree. Everett cared for the crow until it was strong enough to fly, but the crow would simply fly in a loop, land beside him, and start to walk. When Everett tried to drive to town, the crow followed his truck, flying in tandem with his moving face. Everett built a perch out of PVC and stuck it in the cab so that they could travel around together. “I kept trying to get him to go out and have crow sex,” Everett told me. “I said, ‘Listen, you’re not going to get much satisfaction here.’ ”

At the time, Everett was working on “Erasure,” and the crow would shuffle down his arm and peck at the keys. But then he went on vacation, and the bird disappeared. Everett eventually assumed he was dead. He’d named him Jim. Jim Crow.

Everett’s influences are various—Wittgenstein, Chester Himes, Bertrand Russell, J. L. Austin, Robert Coover—and he keeps them front of mind. But, when I asked if he was interested in their personal lives, he seemed to find the idea inconceivable. So I was surprised when he suggested that we go see “Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s film about the composer Leonard Bernstein—another one of Everett’s heroes—and his vexed relationship with his wife.

We went to the Egyptian, a gaudy theatre in the style of a pyramid, complete with hieroglyphs. Onstage, an attendant introduced the film as a “great love story,” but by the end it seemed a great tragedy. Cooper’s Bernstein, absorbed in his work and in multiple affairs, had lost his wife; their love found its strongest expression during his performances, when an orchestra was between them.

As we drove home, Everett seemed more pleased by the film’s artifice than by its insight. The early scenes, rendered in black-and-white, were bold, bombastic, spectacular—conversations turned into dance sequences at the drop of a hat. “I liked that the movie accepted that it was a movie,” he said. “I liked that it wasn’t pretending to be real life.”

Like Bernstein, Kevin Pace, the protagonist of “So Much Blue” (2017), is an artist with a wife and children. At the novel’s start, he’s working on a large abstract painting that he allows no one to see, and which his best friend has agreed to burn if he dies. The painting is a secret, but it’s inspired by secrets, too—by an affair with a French woman nearly twenty-five years Kevin’s junior, and by a pair of encounters on the eve of El Salvador’s civil war. (“A picture is a secret about a secret,” reads the novel’s epigraph, from Diane Arbus.) Kevin’s feelings, like Bernstein’s, are hidden from his family and expressed obliquely in his art. But what begins as an ideal quickly morphs into an indulgence. “There is a cruelty in abstraction,” Kevin reflects near the novel’s conclusion. “My paintings were abstract and splashed with guilt as much as paint, scratched with shame as much as with the knife or spatula.” Kevin never tells his wife his secrets, but he does, in the end, show her his painting. Ignorant of its meaning, she can read only its distortions. “So much blue,” she observes. “Now you know everything,” Kevin says.

The more I read Everett’s work, the more my thoughts turned to jazz. “It is the player who, by improvising, makes jazz,” Bernstein said. “He uses the popular song as a kind of dummy to hang his notes on. He dresses it up in his own way and it comes out an original.” A jazz player may reference sheet music, but the resulting performance—animated by intuition and impulse—exceeds the descriptive capacities of the language it draws from. An elliptical expression of Black life, jazz refuses to be decoded as such. James Baldwin compared it to the talking drum, used to convey messages across distances that the human voice can’t travel: “It is a music which creates, as what we call History cannot sum up the courage to do, the response to that absolutely universal question: Who am I ? What am I doing here ?”

“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is the story of one boy’s escapade down the river that divides the country into East and West. Huck, having faked his own death, is fleeing his alcoholic father. Jim, a father himself, is fleeing Huck’s guardian, who plans to sell him downriver. The two become an unlikely pair, their plights strangely symmetrical. But Huck, in Twain’s treatment, is the hero: Jim’s liberation is his ultimate adventure. In the book’s final chapters, Huck and his friend Tom Sawyer hatch a plan to set Jim free, a process that they protract by requiring Jim, who’s trapped in a cabin, to pen a “mournful inscription.” They instruct him to carve it on a rock, but the rock, just outside the cabin, is too heavy for them to carry alone. They let Jim out, and he carries it with Huck. Then they lock him back up, his freedom a procedural figment of their fantasy.

Everett is not the first to reimagine Huck and Jim’s coupling, which other artists have interpreted as romantic or paternal. But he is perhaps the first to try to invert it. In “James,” Huck is Jim’s shameful appendage, the object of Jim’s resentful affection. He is the secret Jim can’t give up, the wedge that cleaves Jim’s family. At times, they get split up, and the book follows Jim, who’s both unsettled and emboldened: “I was also sick with worry over Huck and ashamed to feel such relief for being rid of him.” And yet he returns to Huck again and again, their reunions exalted and sickly sweet. “You need me,” Huck tells Jim, who hates “that what he said was true.” Their association has the cold determinism of biology, or addiction—it forces Jim into a cruel decision, a decision that seems to contain the promise of a final release but which, once made, pulls him further into the current of their impossible love.

“I’m not correcting anything,” Everett once said. “That would mean I know enough to correct.” And yet it’s difficult not to read “James” as a corrective of Everett’s previous works, if not of its source material. For Jim’s predecessors, freedom requires abstraction: the problem is other people. But Jim’s understanding of freedom is literal. He knows that his happiness depends upon the emancipation of his family. At first, he wields a pencil, but then he exchanges it for a gun.

Everett is transfixed by rivers, and finds some so stunning that he can’t look at them directly. One day, I proposed that he teach me how to fish. Everett wasn’t sure there were fish to be had. It was the end of fall, and Los Angeles hadn’t seen significant rain for months. As we drove into the mountains, things looked bleak. The reservoir was low, the yucca plants were going to seed, and discarded Starbucks cups blew across the road like tumbleweed.

At the riverbed, we set our gear down near the ashes of a fire. Everett showed me his fishing flies, displaying them like a jeweller fingering his gems. There were zug bugs, damselflies, jassid beetles, woolly buggers. Everett enjoys catching fish but is equally enlivened by the process of mimicking their prey. He compares it to writing: once you’ve attracted a reader with what they think they want, you can get them hooked on what you have.

I thought we would fish for hours. But after fifteen minutes Everett suggested that we smoke cigars. We found a rock that looked like a chair and took turns sitting on it. In the distance, the mountains were an unlikely gray. Senna, Everett’s wife, had told me that they’d toyed with a move East. I asked if he would miss the landscape.

“I’m a real Westerner,” he said, gazing at the mountains. “But they would still be here.”

Everett handled his cigar like a cigar. The river was a river. Presumably, it contained fish, even if they refused to make themselves evident.

The following week, Everett returned to the river alone. I’d sensed that he had seen in it something I couldn’t. Over lunch, he relayed what he found. A few miles north of where we had tried to fish, there was an undercut bank; from its ledge, he had been able to see trout slicing through the water.

Because I had failed to observe Everett catch a fish, I suggested we do an activity that might let me observe him read. After we finished our meal, I shuffled a deck of tarot cards and asked him to pose a question.

“How can I help my family be happy?” Everett asked.

I split the deck into three piles. Everett chose a pile, and then I drew three cards from the top of it: the Six of Pentacles, the Magician, and the Five of Cups. In the Five of Cups, a robed man stands alone by a river. Three toppled cups sit before him; two, still upright, are at his back. I asked Everett to tell me what he saw.

“You said the cups are emotions,” he said. “Well, the posture is one of dejection. But there’s a light around him, so it’s maybe not dejection as much as introspection. He’s looking at a river, so the river is time. There’s red and green coming out of those cups. . . . The red would most obviously have to be blood. . . . He’s standing in front of those two cups, protecting them.”

“Do you think he’s looking at himself?” I asked.

“I think he’s looking at the river,” Everett said seriously. “I—I have depression. I suffer from depression.”

“And this feels like a depressive card?” I asked.

“That’s my first thought,” Everett said. “What’s going on in your head while you look at these? That’s what I’m interested in.”

I told Everett what I saw in the cards. While we spoke, I checked to see whether the narrative was resonating. “We’ve made it resonate,” he said. And he was right. A few hours after we parted, I sent him a photo of the cards laid out against the red stain of a wooden table. The next day, he sent me a detail from one of his paintings in progress, a rust-colored expanse with three rectangular figures travelling across it. I wasn’t sure if the painting was inspired by the cards, or if, in my image of the cards, he had seen his painting. ♦

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Rejecting the Binary

The greatest gift judith butler ever gave me was teaching me never to allow your opponent to define the terms of the debate..

When Judith Butler was serving as my dissertation adviser at the University of California in the late 1990s, they did not yet go by “they.” No one in my circle did, and at the time that circle included one of the most forward-thinking spaces in the world when it came to matters of gender: Butler’s dissertation seminar, which met every two weeks so that each of their advisees could present work in progress to the group.

I had never taken an actual class with Judith, who arrived at Berkeley just as I was finishing up my coursework. A few years before, just after my Ph.D.-qualifying oral exam, I had been, in academic terms, deserted at the altar: The professor I had considered my chief ally in the department abruptly, and without explanation, made it clear she would neither advise my dissertation nor recommend me to any of her colleagues. She was one of those professors (the unethical ones, I now realize) who divide their students into an in-group and an out-group, and whatever the cause, I was now on the outs.

I dropped out for a few years, working an office job in San Francisco to save up money for a self-funded year of study abroad. When I came back to Berkeley to finish my degree, the corridors of Dwinelle Hall, where both my department (comparative literature) and Judith’s (rhetoric) were housed, suddenly felt impenetrably unwelcoming. What professor who had never even taught me would be willing to take on my weird interdisciplinary thesis topic? I began awkwardly introducing myself to faculty members I hadn’t interacted with before, flailingly outlining my half-formed idea.

Whether out of interest in the project or just as an act of mercy, Judith agreed to be my adviser. As I would learn over the next few years, they were not only a committed educator but a savvy academic ally, the exact opposite of that professor who had hung me out to dry after my exams. Butler understood the adviser’s role as a crucial cog in the bureaucracy, helping their advisees land fellowships, degrees, and eventually jobs. To that end, they offered me the kindness of welcoming me into their dissertation group, a room full of scarily brilliant (and a few just plain scary) people. Butler’s work by then extended well beyond the subject matter that had made Gender Trouble so influential and controversial when it came out in 1990. That book, Butler’s second, introduced the then-radical notion that gender could be better understood as a socially constructed performance than as a stable biological fact. It was a star-making book, one of those rare academic-press publications that cross over into the mainstream conversation: Whether you read it or not, if you were interested in feminism and queerness in the 1990s, it’s certain you encountered its argument out in the wild.

Because Judith Butler had become a star, even those who never seriously engaged with their work often had an opinion about them. For a few years, the conservative-leaning journal Philosophy and Literature ran an annual “Bad Writing Contest” to mock the alleged obscurantism of contemporary humanities scholars (though every “awardee” just so happened to work on questions related to leftist politics). When Judith won the award in 1999, they published a response in the New York Times that to this day remains a model for how to casually shred someone else’s specious argument using steel-trap logic and a sense of humor. (“I’m still waiting for my check!” Butler observed in acknowledging their recent “prize.”) The editor of Philosophy and Literature, Denis Dutton, never gave out the Bad Writing prize again, demonstrating the efficacy of a bit of advice I recall Judith giving advisees: Always refuse to frame the debate in the terms your opponent has set. It was not only Butler’s writing on gender that offered an alternative to the zero-sum logic of the binary; that insistence on reframing the question was at the heart of their pedagogical method, and maybe the greatest gift they gave me as a teacher.

Thirty-four years and at least a dozen books after Gender Trouble (on their own and co-written with other scholars, covering subjects from hate speech to post-9/11 global politics to Zionist nationalism to the COVID-19 pandemic), Butler is publishing their first book with a nonacademic press. Who’s Afraid of Gender? , out this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is not the simplified, popularized reworking of their early writings on the topic you might expect. Nor is it a polemic in the tradition of Gender Trouble . Instead, it’s an analysis of contemporary political and cultural battles over the very topics that Butler’s early work brought into wider public discussion: the mutability and potential for radical social change that are contained in the category of gender, along with the right of women and all queer, gender-nonconforming, and trans people to live freely and safely in the world.

Who’s Afraid of Gender?

By Judith Butler. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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So who is afraid of gender? Many, many institutional and governmental entities, not to mention activist groups both online and off, are now staging a mass moral panic about a “phantasmatic cluster” of anxieties related to gender and sexuality: queer and trans rights, feminism, abortion, contraception, reproductive technology, book banning. These issues, Butler demonstrates, can all be seen as parts of one very large and urgent problem: the global rise of authoritarianism. Donald Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro—right-wing leaders and religious organizations from around the world are all busy stoking the same fearful rhetoric around the same handful of reliably incendiary issues. Any consumer of right-wing media is dosed many times per hour with “news” about their children being groomed by secret networks of left-wing pedophiles, or the imminent threat posed by imaginary gender pirates whose demand for basic bodily autonomy somehow imperils the sexual self-definition and even the continued existence of heteronormative cis people.

As statistics persistently show, the reverse is true: It’s women and LGBTQ+ people, especially those of color, who are far more likely to be the targets of workplace discrimination, online and street harassment, sexual violence, and murder. The projection of one’s own desire to oppress onto the target of that persecution is the kind of psychosocial phenomenon Butler excels at spotting in the wild, and at dismantling with the swiftness of a hunter field-dressing their prey. “They want to quash critical thought in the name of doctrine,” Butler writes after a discussion of Ron DeSantis’ attempt to institute a “Don’t Say Gay” policy in public schools, “and, by way of an inadvertently confessional projection, assume that their adversaries want the same.”

Gender is taking over, conservatives tell us. It is endangering the purity of the body politic. Butler notes how the right wing employs the language of migration to characterize gender as a force invading from below, transgressing its proper boundaries. Yet conservatives are also happy to replace that language with the image of gender activists as colonizing elites, bent on imposing their corrupt urban values on traditional rural cultures. The cognitive fog induced by letting these side-by-side contradictions stand unremarked upon is part of the point of such rhetoric. In the right-wing imagination, “gender” is nowhere and everywhere at once, an all-purpose wedge issue that Butler describes as a “diabolical” category. It can be spun so as to encompass every horror from Orwellian totalitarianism to lawless anarchy and also, somehow, both at the same time. The same kind of free-floating demonization has been used against Butler in their personal life, as they note in a rare autobiographical passage in the book’s acknowledgments. As their work has been translated and published around the globe, they and their longtime partner, the political theorist Wendy Brown, have been accused by fundamentalist groups of “a chaotic and lurid cluster of sexual crimes”; during a 2017 visit to a conference in Brazil, Butler was burned in effigy and denounced as a witch.

The intersection of psychic and political territory is nowhere better explored—or Butler’s refusal to cede the terms of the debate to the oppressors better displayed—than in Butler’s chapter on TERFs and the British. You might argue that this author’s rhetorical firepower is squandered on opponents with as weak a case to make for themselves as the anti-trans “feminist” movement that claims several high-profile proponents in the U.K. But Butler’s methodical examination of this group’s self-contradicting claims sheds welcome light on the way fantasy, paranoia, and scapegoating can supplant rational argument when it comes to the particular issue of trans rights. The chapter’s highlight is a section on the June 2020 post to J.K. Rowling’s website in which the Harry Potter author revealed for the first time the personal history of domestic abuse that, Rowling wrote, provided the origin story for her ongoing support of anti-trans bathroom legislation.

Butler’s response to Rowling’s autobiographical revelation is a case study in the value of close reading. They start off by conceding two important points: The online bullying and threats to which Rowling was subjected to were unseemly (“I will not condone that kind of behavior, no matter who does it,” Butler writes) and the abuse she suffered at her first husband’s hands was horrific. But Butler’s empathy toward the transphobic billionaire ends there, as they go on to coolly point out that “the motivation one has for entering into a public debate may be worth knowing, but it rarely suffices as the reason everyone should agree with one’s point of view.” Butler zooms in on the language of that 2020 post, a curious document that careens between the confessional and the delusional, with abrupt 180-degree shifts in logic. Immediately after a passage proclaiming her “solidarity and kinship” with trans women, and after stating that her empathy for them includes a desire to keep them safe, Rowling observes that

at the same time, I do not want to make natal women and girls less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to every man who believes or feels he’s a woman—and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones—then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside.

With the dry sense of humor that often characterizes their public speeches (and that used to leaven the mood of those long, sometimes dull dissertation workshops), Butler notes how quickly Rowling transforms these much-empathized-with trans women into a marauding band of poorly disguised men with violent intentions. The volley of questions Butler then poses to the absent specter of Rowling shows how broad a swath of social and political reality the novelist’s gaslighting brief on behalf of transphobia has left out. Rowling stresses her preoccupation with cis women endangered by cis men posing as trans, something that almost never happens, while making no mention of the frequently documented violence against real trans people in virtually all public and private spaces. “It would seem,” Butler writes, “that the violence she is concerned about is domestic violence perpetrated by men, but what about other forms of social violence inflicted against trans people more broadly? … What about incarceration, psychiatric pathologization, street violence, loss of employment?”

Having opened up the concept of “violence” to a broader set of possible meanings, Butler proceeds to do the same with “men”: “Are gay men even included in this category, or are they not thinkable inside the category? What about genderqueer men, or all those who categorize themselves as transmasculine? Transgender men?” True to their own advice, Butler refuses to engage Rowling’s argument on the novelist’s spurious terms. By interrogating her conveniently narrow framing of imagined cis-on-cis sexual aggression that is still, somehow, trans people’s fault, Butler exposes the blinkered paranoia of Rowling’s bathroom-invasion scenario.

As an opponent in a reasoned debate, J.K. Rowling is fairly easy to leave flopping on the deck. But there is nonetheless a lot to be learned from this confrontation between her brand of feelings-based anti-trans activism and Butler’s expansive view of gender, not as the possession of a privileged group that must circle the wagons to defend it, but as a feature of human life that transcends the concept of ownership. Trans-exclusionary feminists, Butler notes, “maintain that their rightful property, their sex, is being taken from them by ‘fake’ women.” But “gender categories are not property, and they cannot be owned. Gender categories precede and exceed our individual lives.” For Butler, gender is best understood not as something one is or has , but as something one does .

In the decades since Gender Trouble came out, though, Butler has acknowledged that their earlier view of the category now seems limited in ways they were unable to see at the time as a white Western feminist trained in traditional European philosophy. Citing the work of feminist and gender-studies scholars from Argentina, Nigeria, and South Africa, Butler observes that many non-Western languages have long had a vocabulary for forms of gendered existence outside the male/female binary.

It’s Butler’s embrace of the ultimate impossibility (even undesirability) of finding one final answer to the question “But what is gender?” that animates their long intellectual and ethical engagement with the subject. At one point in this new book, discussing the work of pioneering feminist scholar Joan W. Scott, Butler calls gender a “form of power”; on the next page, it’s a “structure that saturates the world,” which, while not a contradiction of the previous formulation, is far from a simple restatement of the same idea. Still elsewhere, Butler designates gender as “a site where biological and social realities interact with one another.” Near the end of Who’s Afraid of Gender? comes a burst of lyricism not typical of Butler’s usual rigorously pragmatic voice: “Gender has to remain relatively wild in relation to all those who claim to possess its correct definition.” Here I understand wild not as a synonym for “fierce” or “unruly,” but as the opposite of “domestic” or “tame.” Like a deer encountered on a walk in the woods, gender should be allowed to take off at a run to wherever it’s headed, to lead a free life without fear of unasked-for intrusion. No one, including Butler themself, should be allowed to capture that wild thing.

What about that Bad Writing award? In their first trade-press book, Butler makes a concerted effort to keep Who’s Afraid of Gender? accessible and jargon-free. It is, without question, a demanding read, but not because the author is obfuscating or showing off. Rather, the difficulty derives from the rigor of the thought itself, and the work of accompanying the movement of that thought brings its own kind of pleasure. More than anything, reading this book reminded me of attending one of Butler’s large lecture classes for Berkeley undergrads, which I used to drop into sometimes for the sheer joy of watching Professor Butler think on their feet as they boiled down big ideas into a form that students new to that way of thinking and writing could understand. A generation after I was lucky enough to study with them, Butler has gone from a star in the world of academia to that rare thing: a genuine public intellectual, one whose goal is not to restrict their ideas to an academic in-group, but to bring them to the world and, perhaps, to change it. If you’re not sure whether this book is for you, watch one of the many clips online of Butler talking about their work, like this 2023 lecture , which presents much of the material that makes up the book’s conclusion. What Judith Butler was for me 25 years ago, they now are to whoever cares to read them: a born teacher.

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'3 Body Problem': What to Know About the Netflix Series

You can watch the first season of the sci-fi drama now.

Netflix's new sci-fi series, 3 Body Problem , debuted on Thursday and, yes, dedicated binge-watchers, the entire first season is available now.

Based on a trilogy by Chinese novelist Liu Cixin, the Netflix show in part sets the story in 1960s China, where a young woman's fateful decision "reverberates across space and time into the present day." Mystery is a layer of the eight-episode series, which comes from Game of Thrones co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, and True Blood producer Alexander Woo.

Netflix's sci-fi offering is complex, spanning multiple genres and transporting viewers to various periods and locations, from China during the Cultural Revolution to the present-day UK and into a strange virtual reality game. A plot synopsis teases danger to mankind: "When the laws of nature inexplicably unravel before their eyes, a close-knit group of brilliant scientists join forces with an unorthodox detective to confront the greatest threat in humanity's history."

With big stakes, recognizable cast members from Thrones and plenty of intrigue, here are some more details on the thought-provoking show that may soon hold your attention.

When will the series come out?

You can stream the full first season of 3 Body Problem now. All eight episodes dropped at midnight PT on Thursday.

Carries 3 Body Problem

Netflix's plans currently range from $7 to $23 a month. If you opt for the $7 a month plan, note that it'll include ads and some titles on the platform will be locked due to licensing restrictions. No Hard Feelings, starring Jennifer Lawrence, and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse are examples of movies you can't currently access with ad-based Netflix. Read more about the streaming service in our review .

Meanwhile, another Three-Body Problem adaptation -- the Tencent-produced, 30-episode offering Three-Body -- is available now on Peacock .

What's the series about?

Netflix's adaptation will explore how humanity responds to an existential threat. Though you don't have to be up to date with Liu Cixin's book trilogy, season 1 of the show adapts the first novel -- The Three-Body Problem -- bringing in elements from the second and third books in The Remembrance of Earth's Past series. Slight spoiler (seriously, skip this next line if you don't want to know more about what threat humanity is in for): In the books, an alien civilization wants to invade Earth, and some humans decide to fight and others decide to welcome the extraterrestrial beings.

3 Body Problem shares cast members with Thrones, including John Bradley, Liam Cunningham and Jonathan Pryce. In an interview with ABC News , Bradley, who plays a member of a tight-knit circle known as the "Oxford Five" in 3 Body Problem, said with the show's virtual reality device, "You can plant your characters in any point in history or the future and any place in the world." So expect to be kept on your (hopefully cozy and blanket-covered) toes.

Fans of the book will note various differences between the show and the source material. While the original novels are written in Chinese and contain mostly Chinese characters, this TV version has been broadened to appeal to a wider international audience. Additionally, viewers should know the creative team received Cixin's approval to move forward with -- and alter -- the new Netflix story.

In an interview with SXSW , Benioff said, "The first scene of the show is very similar to the first scene of the novel and the last scene is very similar to the last scene. In between, there's all sorts of deviations … we brought in some stuff from book two, we brought in stuff from book three, there's some stuff we invented." Benioff said they aimed to be true to what the books made them feel: "Wow, the universe is a lot bigger than we thought about before, we're almost certainly not alone in the universe and that might not be a good thing," Benioff said.

Who's in the cast

Here's the rest of the large cast: Jovan Adepo, Rosalind Chao, Eiza González, Jess Hong, Marlo Kelly, Alex Sharp, Sea Shimooka, Zine Tseng, Saamer Usmani and Marvel actor Benedict Wong.

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‘Late Night With the Devil’ Review: Selling Your Soul for the Ratings

An occult-obsessed nation is nimbly captured in this found-footage horror film about a late night show gone horribly wrong.

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A man in a light suit stands in front of a pinwheel, appearing to yell.

By Alissa Wilkinson

“Late Night With the Devil” is trimly effective horror of a rare sort: I found myself wishing, halfway through my screening, that I was watching it on my TV. Not because it doesn’t work in a theater — horror almost always benefits from being seen in a crowd — but because its writer-director duo, the brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes, make shrewd use of some of the uniquely creepy things about television, especially its intimacy. The TV set is in your house, and you’re sitting six feet away from it, and especially in the wee hours of the night, whatever’s staring back at you can feel eerie, or impertinent. Over time, the late night TV host becomes your best friend, or a figure that haunts your fitful dreams.

That’s why people watch late night TV, of course: to laugh, to be entertained and to feel some kind of companionship when the rest of the world goes to bed. “Late Night With the Devil” twists that camaraderie around on itself, layering in familiar 1970s horror tropes about demonic possession, Satanism and the occult. The result is a nasty and delicious, unapologetic pastiche with a flair for menace. I had a blast.

The host of the movie’s invented late night talk and variety show is Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), a younger, snappier Johnny Carson who is desperate to climb to the top of the ratings. Framed as found footage wrapped in a pseudo-documentary, the film briefly fills us in on Delroy’s career trajectory hosting “Night Owls With Jack Delroy,” a show that can’t quite overtake its competitors. As narration informs us that Delroy is risking going down in history as an also-ran — always Emmy nominated, never the winner — we learn that we’re about to watch the night that “shocked a nation.”

On Halloween night, 1977, the first in the crucial sweeps week for “Night Owls,” Delroy and his producers come up with a desperate, last ditch idea to spike ratings: they design a show full of spectacle that will tap into the cultural craze for all things occult. The guest list that night includes a medium and a skeptic, plus a parapsychologist and the girl she’s been treating for demonic possession. The master tapes have been found, the narrator informs us, and that’s what we’re about to see. Buckle up.

All of these characters seem familiar. Carmichael the Conjurer (Ian Bliss), the film’s abrasive skeptic, seems based on James Randi , who appeared on “The Tonight Show” to debunk others’ claims to paranormal abilities, most notably the illusionist Uri Geller in 1973. Randi also confronted mediums on live TV (such as this film’s Christou, played by a hammy Fayssal Bazzi) and was an outspoken critic of parapsychology.

“Late Night With the Devil” also evokes “Michelle Remembers,” the now-discredited 1980 best seller by the psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder about his patient, Michelle Smith, who claimed to have been subjected to ritual satanic abuse. Here the doctor is a parapsychologist played by Laura Gordon, whose performance combines vulnerability and conviction in a fruitful counterbalance to some of the camp. She’s accompanied by her charge, Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), whose oscillation from dead-eyed to vibrant is devilishly disquieting. (If there’s one rule in horror, it’s that there’s nothing creepier than a little girl.)

The film moves a little slowly, unfolding at the speed of the “Night Owls” episode. That’s good. We’re forced to watch it all in real time, just as the audience at home would have, which more or less transforms us into those people in 1977, sitting on the couch in the middle of the night, by turns titillated, captivated and horrified by what’s unfolding on live television. Eventually they — we — are sucked into the whole illusion, an effect I can only imagine is enhanced if you’re watching it all unfold on your actual TV set. You aren’t watching a movie anymore; for a few minutes, you’re part of it.

All of this would have been completely seamless, but for one disappointing formal choice. We’re told the master tape we’re about to watch will be accompanied by previously unseen backstage footage shot during commercial breaks. Though it might have been interesting to leave those scenes out, it makes sense that they’re there — it keeps the film from getting too abstract by filling us in on what’s actually happening between segments.

However, the “footage” is shot in a more traditional shot/reverse shot format, like any film might be, which is weirdly inconsistent with the idea that some rogue cameraman was just hanging out backstage, accidentally capturing footage. Instead it feels scripted, like there were filmmakers present to document the unfolding panic. A more hand-held, one-camera approach might have helped to maintain the movie’s illusion — and made everything far more effectively creepy. (I have a similar quibble with a sequence near the film’s ending, though that feels more subject to the suspension of disbelief.)

But this is relatively minor, in the scheme of things. “Late Night With the Devil” reflects something that movies have often explored — the strangely queasy codependent nature of the live TV host and the audience — through an old trope, which suggests that while you might ask God to save your soul, only the devil will give you what your vanity requires. Invert that, refract it and drag it through sludgy, bloody mud, and you get “Late Night With the Devil”: diabolically good fun.

Late Night With the Devil Rated R: Demons, death and disgusting destruction. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters.

Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson

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If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime and Hulu to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

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Reforming the child welfare system should mean starting with kids

In ‘broken,’ jessica pryce shares stories from her career as a child welfare worker, with a focus on parents.

It is natural to assume that the author of a book on “transforming child protective services” would be interested in children. As such, the most surprising thing about “ Broken ,” Jessica Pryce’s memoir of her career in child welfare, is how disengaged she seems from kids and how best to promote their well-being.

There can be real tension between the needs of children and the rights of their parents, between protecting children and pathologizing different parenting styles or criminalizing poverty. Pryce is not the first expert to argue that the child welfare system places disproportionate scrutiny on Black families — and in particular, on Black mothers. One version of an engaging book on this subject might offer a comprehensive proposal for policy reform. Another might make the case for a family welfare system instead of one focused exclusively on children. Unfortunately, “Broken” is neither of these things. Structured as an awkward crossover between memoir and reported investigation, the result is a bizarre chronicle of self-congratulation rather than an effective contribution to child welfare debates.

By her own account, Pryce drifted into child welfare work, accepting a job as an investigator in the Department of Children and Families in Tallahassee after interning there during her social work master’s degree program. She writes that she felt no particular drive to interview families or children, zoned out during training, and focused on churning through case files, even knowing that as a result she “came off to parents as hurried and detached” and her investigations lacked depth. Until a dear friend was reported to CPS, Pryce writes, she never considered whether the requirements she imposed on parents were fair or helpful. It was not until she went back to graduate school a second time that Pryce says she became acquainted with the extensive data documenting the disproportionate involvement of Black families in the child welfare system, numbers she could have employed to bolster her anecdotes about how Black women experience being investigated.

Pryce borrows a chapter title from “Torn Apart,” Dorothy Roberts’s deeply researched 2022 cri de coeur against racism in the child welfare system, but doesn’t cite that volume or invoke Roberts’s arguments about how foster care affects children. It says a great deal about what kind of book “Broken” is that Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Anti-Racist” appears in Pryce’s footnotes three times, while Roberts, whose decades of work on child welfare ought to have been vital to this book, merits only a single mention. (Pryce makes no mention of — much less offers a rejoinder to — proponents of much more aggressive child welfare policies, such as Harvard University professor Elizabeth Bartholet, who argues for swifter termination of parental rights and speeded-up adoptions.)

Instead of drawing from academic literature, Pryce prides herself on using case studies to build her argument that the child welfare system unfairly penalizes conscientious parents. But the examples she’s chosen tend to work against those contentions.

Take the story of Madisen, whose mother, Didi, struggled with depression and homelessness. Didi left Madisen in the care of Erica, Madisen’s godmother and Pryce’s good friend. (Pryce writes in her introduction that she uses a mix of pseudonyms and real names throughout the book, though it’s often not clear which names are invented.) Though the arrangement was intended to be temporary, Didi eventually abandoned Madisen. Out of quite understandable grief and confusion, Madisen began acting out, and Erica began spanking her, ultimately escalating to holding Madisen down and hitting her with a belt.

To many readers, Madisen’s visible bruises might seem like a logical thing to investigate. Yet Pryce invokes Erica’s experience as evidence of the extreme unfairness of CPS to Erica. How awful and unfair that Pryce’s dear friend, a person who Pryce is sure is incapable of cruelty, could be investigated! What business is it of the state whether parents employ their “chosen form of discipline”?

In defense of Erica, Pryce suggests that 70 percent of American parents spank their children. But she never provides a citation for that figure, which is odd given that some evidence suggests that spanking is on the decline , and probably far less widespread than that figure would suggest. Nor does she spend a moment grappling with whether spanking is an effective form of discipline — many studies suggest it is not — or whether Erica’s escalating punishments of Madisen might have been a sign that they were both in crisis.

I can imagine that being investigated was humiliating and awful for Erica, whose feelings appear to be Pryce’s primary concern. But the story Pryce tells suggests that involvement with the child welfare system did help to straighten out a dreadful tangle. Didi’s parental rights were terminated (a development to which Pryce doesn’t muster much objection), and after Madisen was temporarily placed in foster care, Erica was able to adopt her goddaughter legally.

Then there’s the story of Jatoia and Lawrence, who underwent a harrowing investigation after their prematurely born son, Kenny was horribly injured. Only years later, after both parents lost custody of both of their children and spent time in jail, did Lawrence finally acknowledge that he alone was responsible for Kenny’s injuries: While drunk and high, he dropped the baby outside, and then concealed the accident. Based on the information Pryce provides in “Broken,” it seems terribly unfair that Jatoia also lost her parental rights. But the person most responsible for that injustice isn’t the child welfare investigator who wanted to find out what happened to Kenny. It is Lawrence. If he’d acknowledged his role in Kenny’s injuries sooner, Jatoia would not have been unfairly tarred as an unfit mother, and their children might still be in the custody of one of their biological parents.

It’s also hard to understand why Pryce devotes so little of “Broken” to “blind removal,” an approach to removing children from their families for which she has been a major national advocate. This decision-making process, in which committees of child welfare workers make determinations without knowing a family’s race or ethnicity, or even names, has been adopted in multiple cities and states seeking to reduce racial disparities in their child welfare systems. This is arguably Pryce’s most significant contribution to her field. But perhaps discussing it more fully would have required her to wade into the debate about whether it actually works as intended, and whether “blind removal” is consistent with Pryce’s goal of persuading the child welfare system to see mothers as individuals working through complicated circumstances.

While Pryce tells readers that she was motivated by “a genuine desire to help children in some way,” “Broken” gives the impression that she has little interest in or connection to the specific kids whose stories appear fleetingly in its pages. Pryce reported her own sister to child protective services after witnessing her sister’s partner assault her — and bemoans the impact of that act on their relationship without exploring what happened to her sister’s children. In her telling, Pryce never bothered to find out what happened to the children she met during her first case as an intern, who were living in squalor, infected with ringworm and effectively parenting their baby brother.

Pryce shows no more care with the big questions that have long bedeviled much more serious books about the child welfare system. Writing about domestic violence, she notes that efforts to protect children may end up in tension with efforts to protect mothers. Rather than attempt to propose a balance, she asks, “Who is responsible for protecting whom? What is the prioritization of which victim?” and moves on.

She blithely excuses herself from the greatest problem of child welfare by writing: “There are some children who need immediate protection, some families who need state intervention, and some parents who need judicial accountability. Those types of cases are in the minority nationwide, and they constitute none of the Black mothers in this book.”

That kind of evasion isn’t fair to kids like Rob Henderson, whose recent memoir, “Troubled” recounts an early life with a mother who tied him to a chair so she could get high, a series of neglectful foster parents, and an adoption by a well-meaning mother and father whose marriage subsequently fell apart. It’s not fair to children like David Edwards, who was beaten to death by his parents, and whose murder became the subject of “The Book of David” (1996) , a serious investigation of the child welfare system by Richard J. Gelles.

Designing a child welfare system with the resources and flexibility to keep a child such as Madisen with a parental figure who is loving but overstretched; with the clarity and commitment to place Henderson for adoption sooner; and with policies that didn’t leave Edwards to be murdered by his parents is very, very hard. It takes “vulnerability and culpability,” as Pryce so proudly claims but does so little to demonstrate.

Alyssa Rosenberg writes about mass culture, parenting and gender for The Washington Post’s Opinions section.

Transforming Child Protective Services — Notes of a Former Caseworker

By Jessica Pryce

Amistad. 283 pp. $28.99

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The 3-body problem is real, and it’s really unsolvable

Oh god don’t make me explain math

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Rosalind Chao as Ye Wenjie standing in the middle of three overlapping circles

Everybody seems to be talking about 3 Body Problem , the new Netflix series based on Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past book trilogy . Fewer people are talking about the two series’ namesake: The unsolvable physics problem of the same name.

This makes sense, because it’s confusing . In physics, the three-body problem attempts to find a way to predict the movements of three objects whose gravity interacts with each of the others — like three stars that are close together in space. Sounds simple enough, right? Yet I myself recently pulled up the Wikipedia article on the three-body problem and closed the tab in the same manner that a person might stagger away from a bright light. Apparently the Earth, sun, and moon are a three-body system? Are you telling me we don’t know how the moon moves ? Scientists have published multiple solutions for the three-body problem? Are you telling me Cixin Liu’s books are out of date?

All I’d wanted to know was why the problem was considered unsolvable, and now memories of my one semester of high school physics were swimming before my eyes like so many glowing doom numbers. However, despite my pains, I have readied several ways that we non-physicists can be confident that the three-body problem is, in fact, unsolvable.

Reason 1: This is a special definition of ‘unsolvable’

Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) holds up an apple in a medieval hall in 3 Body Problem.

The three-body problem is extra confusing, because scientists are seemingly constantly finding new solutions to the three-body problem! They just don’t mean a one-solution-for-all solution. Such a formula does exist for a two-body system, and apparently Isaac Newton figured it out in 1687 . But systems with more than two bodies are, according to physicists, too chaotic (i.e., not in the sense of a child’s messy bedroom, but in the sense of “chaos theory”) to be corralled by a single solution.

When physicists say they have a new solution to the three-body problem, they mean that they’ve found a specific solution for three-body systems that have certain theoretical parameters. Don’t ask me to explain those parameters, because they’re all things like “the three masses are collinear at each instant” or “a zero angular momentum solution with three equal masses moving around a figure-eight shape.” But basically: By narrowing the focus of the problem to certain arrangements of three-body systems, physicists have been able to derive formulas that predict the movements of some of them, like in our solar system. The mass of the Earth and the sun create a “ restricted three-body problem ,” where a less-big body (in this case, the moon) moves under the influence of two massive ones (the Earth and the sun).

What physicists mean when they say the three-body problem has no solution is simply that there isn’t a one-formula-fits-all solution to every way that the gravity of three objects might cause those objects to move — which is exactly what Three-Body Problem bases its whole premise on.

Reason 2: 3 Body Problem picked an unsolved three-body system on purpose

A woman floating in front of three celestial bodies (ahem) in 3 Body Problem

Henri Poincaré’s research into a general solution to the three-body problem formed the basis of what would become known as chaos theory (you might know it from its co-starring role in Jurassic Park ). And 3 Body Problem itself isn’t about any old three-body system. It’s specifically about an extremely chaotic three-body system, the exact kind of arrangement of bodies that Poincaré was focused on when he showed that the problem is “unsolvable.”

[ Ed. note: The rest of this section includes some spoilers for 3 Body Problem .]

In both Liu’s books and Netflix’s 3 Body Problem , humanity faces an invasion by aliens (called Trisolarans in the English translation of the books, and San-Ti in the TV series) whose home solar system features three suns in a chaotic three-body relationship. It is a world where, unlike ours, the heavens are fundamentally unpredictable. Periods of icy cold give way to searing heat that give way to swings in gravity that turn into temporary reprieves that can never be trusted. The unpredictable nature of the San-Ti environment is the source of every detail of their physicality, their philosophy, and their desire to claim Earth for their own.

In other words, 3 Body Problem ’s three-body problem is unsolvable because Liu wanted to write a story with an unsolvable three-body system, so he chose one of the three-body systems for which we have not discovered a solution, and might never.

Reason 3: Scientists are still working on the three-body problem

Perhaps the best reason I can give you to believe that the three-body problem is real, and is really unsolvable, is that some scientists published a whole set of new solutions for specific three-body systems very recently .

If physicists are still working on the three-body problem, we can safely assume that it has not been solved. Scientists, after all, are the real experts. And I am definitely not.

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Screen Rant

Star trek: discovery's sonequa martin-green teases burnham's questions & book romance in season 5.

Screen Rant interviews Star Trek: Discovery's Sonequa Martin-Green about Captain Burnhan's season 5 quest and her complicated relationship status.

Captain Burnham leads USS Discovery on a treasure hunt for ancient galactic power in the final season of Star Trek: Discovery .
Season 5 introduces new foes Moll and L'ak, as well as rival Captain Rayner, creating tension with Burnham's character.
Burnham's relationship with former flame, Cleveland Booker, continues to be complicated and evolves in the upcoming season.

Sonequa Martin-Green is taking her last ride as Captain Michael Burnham in Star Trek: Discovery season 5. As the series lead and a producer, Martin-Green has portrayed a revolutionary Star Trek heroine, taking Burnham from mutineer to Captain in Discovery 's 5 seasons.

In Star Trek: Discovery season 5 , Captain Burnham leads the USS Discovery on a treasure hunt for an ancient galactic power , which is sought after by new foes Moll (Eve Harlow) and L'ak (Elias Toufexis), as well as rival Starfleet Captain Rayner (Callum Keith Rennie). Burnham also reunites with her former flame, Cleveland Booker (David Ajala).

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 - Everything We Know

Screen Rant interviewed Sonequa Martin-Green prior to Star Trek: Discovery season 5's world premiere at SXSW to discuss Captain Burnham's journey , Discovery season 5's new faces, and Burnham and Book's complicated relationship status.

Sonequa Martin-Green Relishes Captain Burnham's Last Ride In Star Trek: Discovery Season 5

Screen Rant: In Discovery season 5, Burnham's asking big questions, capital B big questions. She's searching for something and not just the treasure. What can you tell me about Burnham's big questions and her personal journey?

Sonequa Martin-Green: Oh, my goodness. Well, I think that the story of season five is one that only Season Five Burnham would have been able to go through so successfully, and so effectively. Because we have this woman who has found herself. She understands that her value can't be measured or quantified. She understands that her crew is invaluable as well. She knows how to dig the gold out of them. She's done the work to grow and become who she is, and be the captain that she is, that matriarchal leader who will get down and dirty but who leads with grace. I think that what Burnham and the crew, the entire crew, deal with in season 5, I think it actually applies to everyone. That they were perfectly ready for those capital B big questions and big concepts. They were ready for it because all of them had grown to the point where they could handle it.

In season 5, there are these great new characters that come in. Captain Rayner is amazing. Such a different vibe, like oil and water with Burnham. Tell me about working with Callum Keith Rennie.

Sonequa Martin-Green: Oh, we love Callum. We always welcome everybody with open arms, and with a big smile and a hug, and let's go let's fly, you know. And so, he just became a part of our family. It was very seamless. And he's so different from what we've seen before. And we really appreciated that, and he's brilliant. Everyone that came [in], Eve [Harlow] and Elias [Toufexis] as well. Our Moll and L'ak, like same same. Elias had been in the show before, early early early on, for just a hot second in season one. So it was great to welcome him back. And we alwayslove these people that come in, and they make a mark that can never be raised. And they were family. And now they always will be, and it was a joy to watch them work. All of them.

What Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 Has In Store For Burnham & Book

Burnham and Book are obviously endgame. It's one of the best love stories ever in Star Trek.

Sonequa Martin-Green: Oh, thank you.

What is your take on their relationship in season 5 and what David brings to your chemistry?

Sonequa Martin-Green: Oh, man. Well, David, it's really interesting because he played such an important role - of course, everyone's role is of utmost importance - But we saw this new future through his lens. And in a lot of ways, he was our future perspective, jumping ahead, but beyond where any Trek has ever been, to the year 3188. At the top of season 3, we learned about this world through him in a lot of ways. I feel that he brought a sense of excitement. He brought a sense of fun. He brought a sense of freedom. And he definitely affected Burnham in that way and helped her come out of that shell, helped her start to define her duty internally rather than externally. So he brings a great deal and Burnham and Book, I always say this, I think it's perfect. They are the classic old Facebook. What was it called?

Relationship status?

Sonequa Martin-Green: Yes, relationship status. Thank you! It's complicated. That's them. That's them. It’s complicated.

About Star Trek: Discovery Season 5

The fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery finds Captain Burnham and the crew of the USS Discovery uncovering a mystery that will send them on an epic adventure across the galaxy to find an ancient power whose very existence has been deliberately hidden for centuries. But there are others on the hunt as well … dangerous foes who are desperate to claim the prize for themselves and will stop at nothing to get it.

Check back soon for our other Star Trek: Discovery season 5 interviews here:

Alex Kurtzman & Michelle Paradise
Doug Jones & David Ajala
Wilson Cruz, Mary Wiseman & Blu del Barrio

Star Trek: Discovery season 5 premieres April 4 on Paramount+ Source: Screen Rant Plus

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How to Write a Book Review (Meaning, Tips & Examples)
How to write a book review. Note down the key points- This is an important step before writing a book review. Jot down your analysis about the characters, themes, plot, and your personal view. Also, note down the book title, author's name, and any relevant information about the book. Start with a strong introduction- Mention the author's ...
Demystifying Book Review Writing Services: How Do They Work?
Understanding Book Review Writing Services. Definition and Scope; To grasp the essence of book review writing services, it's essential to delve into their definition and the scope of services they offer. These specialized services go beyond the traditional book review platforms often found on retail websites or social media. Book review ...
How to Write A Book Review: Definition, Structure, Examples
Understanding the Purpose of a Book Review. It's important to know why you write a book review before you get started on the actual process of doing so. A book review is important for many reasons, such as: Telling Possible Readers. A well-written review summarizes the book, its main ideas, and what the reader should take from it.
How to write a book review: format guide, & examples
Step 1: Planning Your Book Review - The Art of Getting Started. You've decided to take the plunge and share your thoughts on a book that has captivated (or perhaps disappointed) you. Before you start book reviewing, let's take a step back and plan your approach.
How to Write a Book Review: Definition, Structure, Examples
Book Review Template. The book review format includes an introduction, body, and conclusion. Introduction. Describe the book cover and title. Include any subtitles at this stage. Include the Author's Name. Thesis. Write a brief description of the novel. Briefly introduce the main points of the body in your book review.
How to Write a Book Review: The Complete Guide
A review is going to reflect my personal experience with the book, but I can help potential readers by taking a minute to consider what the author intended. Let me explain what I mean. How to Write a Book Review: Consider a Book's Promise. A book makes a promise with its cover, blurb, and first pages.
Writing a Book Review
Definition. A book review is a thorough description, critical analysis, and/or evaluation of the quality, meaning, and significance of a book, often written in relation to prior research on the topic. ... Purdue University; Writing Book Reviews. Writing Tutorial Services, Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. Indiana University; Suárez ...
Book Reviews
A review is a critical evaluation of a text, event, object, or phenomenon. Reviews can consider books, articles, entire genres or fields of literature, architecture, art, fashion, restaurants, policies, exhibitions, performances, and many other forms. This handout will focus on book reviews.
Book Review
Book reviews mean to serve as research of a book or topic. Book reviews typically range from 500 to 2,000 words in length and provide critical analysis of the book being reviewed. Book reviews ...
How to Write a Book Review: 3 Main Elements of a Book Review
1. Back up your argument with examples. Critical analysis needs supporting evidence. Saying a book is good or bad won't suffice; a book review requires a thorough examination of the plot, writing style, and characters. Examples taken directly from the book provide strong support for critical points made in the body paragraphs of your review.
Top 5 Paid Indie Book Review Services Compared
Here at SPR, we consider that we are one of five review service big-hitters, and therefore we compared ourselves to each of those: BlueInk Review, Foreword Clarion, Kirkus Reviews, and Indie Reader. We chose these because they use professional writers, have good quality websites and a sizeable brand presence in the indie book arena.
How to write a book review
Writing a book review involves the following steps: List down preliminary information about the book. Before you begin to read, consider the title of the book and what you think it conveys. Do some research on the biographical details of the author, the setting of the book, the author's purpose in writing the book, etc. Going through the ...
How to Write a Book Review in 3 Steps
Be sure to mention the authors of the title and what experience or expertise they bring to the title. Check Stefan Kløvning's review of Creativity Cycling for an example of a summary that establishes the framework of the book within the context of its field. Step 2. Present your evaluation.
Book review
A book review is a form of literary criticism in which a book is merely described (summary review) or analyzed based on content, style, and merit. [1] A book review may be a primary source, an opinion piece, a summary review, or a scholarly view. [2] Books can be reviewed for printed periodicals, magazines, and newspapers, as school work, or ...
How to Write a Book Review: The Ultimate Guide
The real value of crafting a well-written book review for a student does not lie in their ability to impact book sales. Understanding how to produce a well-written book review helps students to: Engage critically with a text. Critically evaluate a text. Respond personally to a range of different writing genres.
Research Guides: How to Write a Book Review: Introduction
2. Writing a review will help you understand a book better. When you are going to write a good book review, you need to read the entire book carefully. By assigning a book review, the professor is seeking to help you understand the book better. A book review is a critical assessment of a book. "Critical" here means analytical.
13 Types of Book Review: The Complete List Explained
Examples include freelancing bloggers, news reporters, or magazines. Editorial reviews can be paid or done free. 5. Fiction Book Review. A review of a work of fiction typically involves a critical analysis of recently published or revised novels, short stories, legends, and fairy tales.
17 Book Review Examples to Help You Write the Perfect Review
It is a fantasy, but the book draws inspiration from the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Rape of Nanking. Crime Fiction Lover reviews Jessica Barry's Freefall, a crime novel: In some crime novels, the wrongdoing hits you between the eyes from page one. With others it's a more subtle process, and that's OK too.
How to Write a Book Review: Formats + 7 Examples
Book Review Example 5 - Facebook Post. You can keep your writing short and still know how to write a book review that gets the job done. This is what someone wrote about a popular book and their take on it. Notice how they specifically tell who this book is for and who would most enjoy it.
Guide: Book Reviews
A book review addresses the subject matter of a literary work, and assesses effectiveness and value. Book reviews keep publishers and the public aware of what is being thought and written in a wide range of subjects. When a new book is issued, copies are sent to reviewers; subsequent reviews appear in literary magazines, academic journals ...
Book Review
Book Review Definition & Meaning. A book review is an evaluation document that contains information about newly released books with a brief description of the book's main ideas, like its theme and characters.. A book review also contains a short outline of the strengths and weaknesses of the book for a thorough evaluation coming from the reviewer to the author.
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Book Review Service. One simple package that will kick-start your book's visibility. Reach thousands of readers and enter our Literary Book Awards! We are dedicated to providing a well-written and informative review on major websites that entices readers and gives credibility to your work. Our expert reviewers, handpicked for their ...
Percival Everett Can't Say What His Novels Mean
Books, either written or read, are conventionally understood to be pathways to knowledge. But Everett claims to suffer from "work amnesia"; after publishing a book, he forgets its contents ...
Judith Butler's crucial new book, Who's Afraid of Gender?, is written
At one point in this new book, discussing the work of pioneering feminist scholar Joan W. Scott, Butler calls gender a "form of power"; on the next page, it's a "structure that saturates ...
3 Body Problem Episode 1 Recap: Did the Universe Just Wink?
Over eight episodes, 3 Body Problem travels from China's recent past to a series of mysterious suicides among scientists in the present day. In the "Inside the Episode" video feature above, the creators dive deep into the themes and stories behind director Derek Tsang's series premiere. "There was a huge amount of heavy lifting in ...
'3 Body Problem': What to Know About the Netflix Series
Netflix's new sci-fi series, 3 Body Problem, debuted on Thursday and, yes, dedicated binge-watchers, the entire first season is available now. Based on a trilogy by Chinese novelist Liu Cixin, the ...
'Late Night With the Devil' Review: Selling Your Soul for the Ratings
Directed by Cameron Cairnes, Colin Cairnes. Horror. R. 1h 33m. Find Tickets. When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission ...
Review: 'Broken' by Jessica Pryce
Review by Alyssa Rosenberg. March 22, 2024 at 10:00 a.m. EDT. (Amistad) 8 min. It is natural to assume that the author of a book on "transforming child protective services" would be interested ...
What is the 3-body problem, and why is it unsolvable?
In other words, 3 Body Problem 's three-body problem is unsolvable because Liu wanted to write a story with an unsolvable three-body system, so he chose one of the three-body systems for which ...
Star Trek: Discovery's Sonequa Martin-Green Teases Burnham's Questions
Season 5 introduces new foes Moll and L'ak, as well as rival Captain Rayner, creating tension with Burnham's character. Burnham's relationship with former flame, Cleveland Booker, continues to be complicated and evolves in the upcoming season. Sonequa Martin-Green is taking her last ride as Captain Michael Burnham in Star Trek: Discovery season 5.

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How to Write a Book Review: A Comprehensive Tutorial With Examples

Book Review Template

Step 1: Planning Your Book Review – The Art of Getting Started

Choosing Your Literature

Crafting the Master Plan

The Devil is in the Details

The Key Questions to Ponder

Step 2 – Crafting the Perfect Introduction to Write a Book Review

Identify Your Book and Author

Ponder the Title

Judge the Book by Its Cover (Just a Little)

Present Your Thesis

How to Write a Book Review: Step 3 – Building Brilliant Body Paragraphs

Summarize Without Spoilers

Support Your Viewpoint with Quotes

Analyze the Quotes

Structure Your Body Paragraphs

How to Write a Book Review: Step 4 – Crafting a Captivating Conclusion

Summarize Your Analysis

Offer Your Final Conclusion

Address the Book’s Appeal

Be Subtle and Balanced

Bringing It All Together

How to Write a Book Review: Step 5 – Rating the Book (Optional)

Why Rate the Book?

How to Rate the Book

Tips for Rating the Book

Wrapping Up

Additional Tips on How to Write a Book Review: A Guide

Hook ’em with an Intriguing Introduction

Embrace the World of Fiction

Opinionated with Gusto

Express Your Love (or Lack Thereof)

Templates and Examples and Expert Help: Your Trusty Sidekicks

Be a Champion for New Writers and Literature

Criticize with Clarity, Not Cruelty

Avoid the Comparison Trap

Top 7 Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Succumbing to the Lure of Plot Summaries

Unleashing the Spoiler Kraken

Riding the Personal Bias Express

Wielding the Vague Language Saber

Ignoring the Contextualization Compass

Overindulging in Personal Preferences

Forgetting the Target Audience Telescope

Calculate Your Order Price

How to Write a Book Review: Awesome Guide

What Is a Book Review?

Book Review Template

Get Your BOOK REVIEW WRITTEN!

How to Write a Book Review: Step-By-Step

Step 1: Planning

Step 2: Introduction

Step 3: Body

Step 4: Conclusion

Step 5: Rate the Book (Optional)

Writing Tips

Book Review Examples

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