One Satisfying Strategy for Dealing with a Bad Book Review

Your book is coming out soon! Advanced Reader's Copies have been sent to reviewers! Any day you could get that very first review! 

And then you get it.

And it isn't, shall we say, quite the review you were hoping for.

Maybe it's scathing (I've gotten a few of those). 

Maybe it's lukewarm, damning the book, as Alexander Pope noted, with faint praise (I've gotten plenty of those).

Maybe it's full of praise but not quite enough praise to satisfy an author still yearning for undying fame (the story of my writing life).

What should you do?

My new hobby is to go on the book review website Goodreads and see what readers have to say about the greatest classics in the history of literature. I can't stop doing it.

War and Peace has a rating of 4.1 out of 5 stars. One reader called it "not quite as readable as some other BIG books I have read but still pretty good." Another reader, giving it three stars, called it "okay-ish."

Middlemarch has a rating of 3.98. "At times a slog, but not too bad in the end." "I just COULD NOT get into this book." "Some books are just meant to be read as part of a college class. This was one of those books."

Well, all right, maybe it's understandable that books of the past might command a less enthusiastic reception in the present. But when I look up books by my favorite contemporary authors, like Anne Tyler or Ann Patchett, there still are plenty of detractors.

My favorite novel by Pulitzer-Prize-winning Anne Tyler is Ladder of Years: Goodreads rating of 3.72. "The only book I ever bought on a business trip, then threw in the trash." "I did not relate well to the main character. . . so I dragged through the plot." "I thought maybe this book would be different from Tyler's others. I guess I'm just not into her." 

Ann Patchett's riveting best-seller Bel Canto gets 3.92 of 5. One reader gave it a tie for her prize for Most Disappointing Book of the Year. Another wrote, "I finish every book I start, yet I did not finish this one!"

I could give a thousand more examples - this is indeed my new hobby - but the lesson here is clear. Sara Lee may have used the advertising slogan "Everybody doesn't like something, but nobody doesn't like Sara Lee," but when it comes to books, there is no book on earth that somebody doesn't love.

Including books by me.

Including books by you.

But I think it's also true there is no book that is not loved by at least somebody. One book I read over and over again in childhood, The Magic Ring by Neta Lohnes Frazier, published in 1959, is all but forgotten now, with only four ratings (average 3.25) and three reviews (all positive enough) on Goodreads. But the child I once was loved it so!

Somewhere out there is a child who loves a book of yours this way. 

And a child who loves a book of mine this way, too.