Why I like bad reviews of books

Well... I don't like them. I wish no one ever had anything bad to say about a book, and that we all were always able to unerringly pick out only books that we loooooove to read. I do, however, often find them helpful.

I am looking for birthday gifts for my baby sister. When I say that, people always picture a baby. I do, too. She's turning 24 this year, and I will always picture a baby. (Actually, I specifically picture the baby in this photograph a lot.)

It's not all that difficult to buy her a birthday gift, but I try -- with all the people I buy gifts for -- to not only buy her something she wouldn't buy for herself, but to often find the thing she never even would have thought she wanted.

Usually this is a book.

For my baby sister's birthday (which is not until July, so I started looking for the appropriate gift around February), I have determined that I am going to buy her two books this year. (Both of these books were linked by someone whose journal I read often, so -- thanks, torachan!) Book number one is going to be Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century by Graham Robb. Book number two is going to be My Dearest Holmes by Rohase Piercy.

Both of these books have positive and mixed reviews on amazon.com; the latter book has negative reviews as well. This is what I find amazon.com to be really good for (I checked for these books at Powell's, where I prefer to buy books these days; the former is listed with no reviews, and the latter isn't listed at all. That's life, I guess.)

While I find the positive reviews to be somewhat helpful, I already knew I wanted to buy the books. I didn't really need any encouragement -- and that's what positive reviews usually are. If you knew you wanted the book, a positive review just reinforces your want; if you didn't know you wanted the book, a positive review can get you excited at best (and at worst, a positive review can often spoil the book's plot or twists).

That is where the negative reviews come in. Negative reviews of books often have a lot of detail about why the book is bad, or are very succinct and tell you why the book is bad in just a few words. Here is an example from My Dearest Holmes...

I would not recommend this book to anybody. I can not believe that somebody would write about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson being gay. That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever read.

...You see that? Immediately I think, "Wow, pretty much every single person I know -- including my baby sister -- would write about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson being gay. It is totally ridiculous, and also totally awesome. How wonderful!"

That is the only one star review that book has. The other reviews mostly say things like, "I love everything about this book" and "A beautiful read" and "I really enjoyed this book"... That is not helpful to me at all. I don't care what Mary Sue and Gary Stu thought of the book! I care what my sister is going to think about it. And thanks to that negative review, I know she is going to think, "So it's Watson and Holmes off solving crimes with a gay romance? Give it to me now!"

I also love negative reviews because they're a warning. Often a positive review will not warn for things like extended rape scenes or rampant homophobia. A negative review has no compunction about criticizing an author's "magical Negro" or rolling its eyes at the unacceptable depiction of BDSM. I think that negative reviews often say a lot about reviewers, too, and what we can expect from them.

Take again the person who wrote the one-star review of the Holmes/Watson book. I know that I cannot trust that person's book recommendations, because they aren't looking for the same things I am in books. I figured that out pretty easily from the homophobia in the review. We might even have some favorite books or genres in common, but we're not looking for and expecting the same things from a book.

What I like to do, when looking for book review sites to read, is take a book I really disliked and search the review site for it. If the reviewer reviewed it positively, I look for more books I hated until I find one we both hated. Then I see what the reviewer hated about it. Sometimes it's the same thing(s) I hated, but sometimes it's totally different. If it's totally different and I disagree with the conclusion, I tend to skip that review site or that particular reviewer, or not take the reviews from that reviewer as seriously as I take other reviews.

Sometimes negatives reviews bring up excellent points that I nevertheless don't care about. For example, one of the mixed reviews about Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century by Graham Robb is that it reads like a textbook. Well, I don't care! Some textbooks are interesting, and... well, frankly, it's a nonfiction book about queer history. How is it supposed to read, exactly? It's the very very rare nonfiction book about any history that doesn't read like a textbook!

Here is a related anecdote about What I Did For Love by Susan Elizabeth Phillips. I am an SEP fan from way back. I own every single one of her books. Yet I am never going to buy another book by her! That is how much I hated What I Did For Love. I found every single character unlikeable. I found her depiction of fat people to be disgusting (and almost irresponsibly playing into stereotypes). I thought the "love" story in the book made zero sense and the way all the characters treated each other was horrifying. The epilogue made me throw up in my mouth a little.

After finishing the book (and complaining to Twitter about it), I immediately went to Dear Author, convinced that at least one of the reviewers there would have reviewed this book with a well-deserved D or F.

WRONG.

Dear Author gave this book a B- -- and did not bring up things like the subplot of the fat personal assistant and the housekeeper who lectures him on how if he would only stop eating cookies and chips, he'd get thinner and his life would be better. There is even a scene in the book where he is covered in, like, crumbs or something, and she takes away the food he's eating and supplies him with a green salad and a skinless chicken breast or something.

...Seriously? That's not problematic? It's not worth mentioning that the housekeeper is a POC with one of the worst and most stereotyped/stereotypical backgrounds possible? And no one in the comments brought it up either! The comments were full of people debating the Brad/Jen/Angelina triangle (what the book is clearly based on) instead of talking about the book itself.

I went back through that reviewer's old reviews and realized that zie gives positive reviews to books I hate, and negative reviews to books I like on a pretty consistent basis. So I don't read that reviewer's reviews anymore -- it just makes me irritated!

As an editor, I only read the bad reviews because I needed to know what was going on with my books. (Okay, sometimes I read them because they were helpful when I was sulking about authors not doing what I asked in editorial letters. "I told that author not to do that! Every single review mentions it in a totally negative way!!!" etc.) As an author, I never read the negative reviews, because what good would it do? Our agent reads them and tells us if they contain any kind of valid criticism (but usually they don't).

As a reader, however, I find them very valuable!

How about you?