I suppose she’d been made to read it as part of her school’s participation in the book award, but she’d resented it so hugely she was very keen to let me know about it. Maybe she ought to try for a career as a tabloid columnist. I sent the review to my brother, who declared ‘She sounds like xxxxxxx xxxxxxxx* after three lines of coke.’ She certainly had a vivid style, although I’m sure she hadn’t been at the white powder. … Paul if you ever read this - here is a little tip.PUT IN A TRANSLATOR WE DON'T KNOW HOW TO SPEAK WHATEVER LANGUAGE IT IS!! I am going to give this book a 1. There follows eight lines of angry ranting. (1) the way half of it was in a different language I could not understand at all. I normally like reading books about wars but this was just B.O.R.I.N.G!! I absolutely hated every second of it. WHAT A NIGHTMARE!!! I didn't like this book at all - it was horrible. I had added a few German words to make the speech a little more Germanic - things like Mὕtter and Vater and Fräulein - nothing too complex and certainly nothing that would have foxed your average Beano reader. The funniest bad review I got was from a girl who absolutely detested my East German novel Sektion 20, and took out her rage in the reviews section of a Northern Irish book award website. Champagne (or maybe it was prosecco) was cracked open. Fortunately, in one glorious weekend shortly afterwards, two other reviews appeared in the Independent and the Sunday Times, both of which praised the book to the hilt. I felt sick with anxiety and disappointment for several days, wondering if any other reviews would be so damning. …there is little to attract novel readers, and nothing at all for girls. Sam and the other characters exist (as)… wooden figures within the wooden walls, like two-dimensional cutouts in a museum diorama they lack vitality, depth, and humanity. I was distraught - not least because this was the first review of the first fiction I’d written and I thought ‘Oh no, I’ve been found out.’ The reviewer was an academic whose speciality is children’s fiction, and she wrote such an excoriating hatchet job it couldn’t have been worse if I’d just burned her house down with a flamethrower. The worst review I ever had was for my first novel Powder Monkey, about a young sailor in Nelson’s navy called Sam, which appeared in an online journal. I’m still proud of that.īut bad reviews are an altogether different kettle of piranhas and I’ll be deeply alarmed by one, unless it’s on Goodreads, when I might just feel irritated. The Books for Keeps reviewer said ‘Any book that keeps me, my 14-year-old son and my 75-year-old dad intrigued and entertained has got to be a winner.’ Job done. My favourite review came from a non-fiction book of survival stories I wrote for early-teens nearly twenty five years ago. (And they certainly do.) And although on-line reviews are always interesting to read, and more often written by the non-fruitcake fraternity, the variable quality of these reviews does diminish the weight attached to them. These days any old fruitcake can contribute to a plethora of on-line review sites. When I started off, you considered yourself lucky to be reviewed in any print medium – from specialist journals to national newspapers. The chances of being reviewed have gone through the roof over the last 20 years.
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