Yocheved's Bookshelf

Yocheved’s Reviewing Rules

Reviewing books seems simple enough to people who don’t do it for a living, but there's a lot more to it than the simple book reports you remember from elementary school. A professional book reviewer does more than merely read a book and write down what it’s about and why they liked it. An authoritative book reviewer evaluates the quality of someone else’s writing by paying attention to several factors involved in the writing process.

The passage below segues from easily understood principles to more complex considerations about the things that I consider when reviewing a book. It will clue you in to the thought-processes involved and perhaps help you to understand how I select which books to present on the site for review. Writers will recognize the factors that will make their storytelling a success and literature students will realize why teachers are so hard on them (Here’s a truism, kids. Unless your writing and literature teachers are sadists, they’re trying to make you into a quality writer and reader).

Here are Yocheved’s Reviewing Rules for evaluating other people's writing:

Remain objective. Put personal prejudices aside. Explore the mind of the author who strove to present an intelligently considered body of thought, and figure out why they presented their ideas in a given manner. Skip any publicity materials or other reviews that arrived with the book until after I’ve written my own review. Include any pertinent comments made by the author to me.

Unless the book is inexcusably bad, assume that the author worked diligently and intelligently on it to convey a specific message. However, if it's obvious that the author didn't work very hard on the book, it isn’t necessary to gloss over that fact (I'm thinking of the quote, "What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure." -- Samuel Johnson). I will either reject material that condemns moral conduct, promotes gross and improper behavior or simply begs the credulity of the reader as a waste of my time and an abuse of potential readers, or I will point out its flaws so that unsuspecting readers are not duped. I did this years ago with a travel book that excoriated every known religious belief with the exception of worship at “Crop Circles” allegedly created by aliens.

With fiction, I examine the

• Plot
• Characterization
• Setting (are the speech and mannerisms of the characters and the events of the story consistent with the historical setting? Does the setting complement the plot or not?)
• Pacing (make note of inconsistent or fine rising and falling action, the success or failure of the intended climax)
• Foreshadowing (I might not mention it unless something exceptionally wrong occurs in the story)
• Theme
• Resolution
• Illustrations (if they were included, were they useful? If they weren’t included, should they have been?)
• Vocabulary (is it age- and content-appropriate?)
• Wit and Humor

• Author's qualifications/expertise
• Originality
• Book's usefulness or interest to readers at specific age and experience levels
• Author's organization of subject matter
• Writing style (is the writer easy to understand? Is there sufficient documentation to support the writer’s conclusions?)
• Clarity of instructions/directions in instruction books
• Criticisms of and/or supportive comments about the text that have been made by other qualified experts
• Vocabulary (is it age- and content-appropriate?)
• Illustrations (if they were included, were they useful? If they weren’t included, should they have been?)

• Publisher
• Publishing date
• Whether the book is a hardcover or paperback (and if it comes as both)
• The price of the book
• Where it is sold (if sales are limited to exclusive outlets or conversely, available in unexpected venues)
• For whom it is recommended (if I disagree with the publisher or author recommendations, I’ll mention what I think as well).

1. Deduce smaller points from larger ones and vice versa
2. Use similar words in different contexts to clarify each other (that’s why a Concordia is so useful) because two independent observations are supposed to illuminate each other.
3. Employ general principles derived from a body of common knowledge and augment or reduce the meaning of those principles with logically similar supportive or non-supportive passages. Remember Chekhov’s caveat: If there’s a gun on the wall, it better go off before the end of the story or the author is at fault for misleading the reader. Details are important and they have to be appropriate to the story’s message.
4. Contain general statements limited by specifications (if the gun on the wall is rusted and bent, it will not shoot unless the author foreshadows why it would) that apply only to subsequent, specific situations in the story.
5. Make specifications broadened by general statements implying that there are no exceptions to the rule (foreshadowing is an unforgiving and necessary tool in fiction and informational books have to be painstakingly accurate, so they have to be prepared correctly)
6. Be sure that general statements indicate that every similar detail which follows is included in these expectations, but specifications imply that readers (including the reviewer) can only infer what is similar to the specification
7. Have general statements requiring specification and specification requiring a general statement for clarity of meaning (there goes that foreshadowing monster again, as well as that tediously prepared nonfiction book)
8. Support anything included in a statement but which is singled out from the general statement in order to teach a point implying that it is teaching about a generality as well as itself
9. Express that anything within a general statement but singled out to highlight a point similar to a generality is to be considered more lenient rather than more pressing (an exception to the rule, or what I taught my students as “The Rule of the Way Out”)
10. Account for anything that is singled out for special consideration. It must remain unique to the story. The mere presence of that mention necessarily drives some of the action or motivation.
11. Not be a contradiction in terms. The author cannot arbitrarily backtrack on rules he or she set forth earlier in the book. Simply put, “No backsies.”
12. Contain details of the story or information consistent with the details before and after them. When authors breach this rule I single them out for failing to maintain the story line.
13. Contradictions in the text must necessarily be reconciled. Otherwise, the story or the information will become meaningless. Know what you intend to say and be sure that this is what you conveyed to the reader.