Bad reviews, Goodreads

I’ve always loved a bad review. Not quite “Guy Fieri, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square?” bad, but not good. There’s not much to be gleaned from a good review, and when we’re crowdsourcing opinions at the scale that we do now, good reviews all blend into a shapeless mass.

I can appreciate the sentiment of readers on Goodreads who genuinely love something and want all their friends and anonymous online followers to know about it, but as a writer it doesn’t give me much insight. Give me those two- and three-starrers, the two-star review that the reviewer insists is really a two and a half if only Goodreads would allow half-stars. This is where the good stuff is. 

Pick through the reviews on any listed book, and you will find a few reviewers who can thoughtfully dismantle a novel with intelligence and good humour (shoutout to Karen). These are generally reviewers who respect the hard work that goes into writing a novel-length work, but have read enough, critically enough, to offer constructive criticism. 

Reading popular crowdsourced opinion sites (such as TripAdvisor and Rotten Tomatoes), you start to discern useful patterns, and Goodreads is no different. Early and advance reviews are generally good, in the five-star range, maybe because the majority of reviewers (not all) feel grateful for receiving advance readers’ copies. In this ecosystem, the two-star assessment is particularly valuable. 

In reading contemporary thrillers and mysteries, the one criticism I’m looking for above all others is that the plot is implausible, or impossible, or requires too great a suspension of disbelief. Bad characterizations, overall plot assessments, opinions on story – these are all subjective, so don’t generally feed into my parsing of the reviews. But if a few two-star reviewers tell me that the plot doesn’t hold together, that the mystery and its solution are flawed, then those are the books I want to read.

I want to see where they went wrong, and try to avoid it if I can. Crafting a plausible solution to my mystery, despite a seemingly far-fetched premise, has been one of the great challenges of writing this novel. I realize that I am massively jinxing myself with this, setting myself up for a Goodreads takedown if I ever manage to get published. I’m okay with that. It’s worth it to get the guidance of the Karens of the world.