by Joy Cooke

Created on: March 13, 2010

As a reviewer you have the power to make or break someone’s interest in a book. But to do that you need to give us more than the general plot and a few lines about why you liked the book.

In a perfect world you will have a paragraph or two of plot followed by (or preceded by, whichever way round you write your review) a more in depth look about what you did or didn’t think worked in the novel. Touch on characters but don’t base your review around them, obviously particularly strong characters need more than a couple of lines but we really don’t need complete paragraphs on every single person who enters the main storyline.

The obvious exception to this is books which are based around just one or two characters, I find detective novels need a more detailed look at the main protagonists as there is generally only the detective team (usually one male and one female these days) and the hunted criminal that feature heavily in this genre. In this instance I like to hear about the nuances of the characters, are they irritatingly upbeat or is their conversations littered with ‘amusing’ anecdotes that are actually anything but. This is important to your review as a badly constructed character can completely destroy someones interest in a novel and more particularly so when he is one of only a handful of characters in the story.

A book review doesn’t always need to consist of 2000 or more words, yet it needs to have enough of a word count for you to adequately describe the story and give your impressions of it. Recently I have read book reviews that have over 1000 words and I’ve also read much shorter ones, both of which have been crammed full of personal opinion and helped me to make my decision on whether or not to read those particular books. Then, on the other side of the coin, I have read much longer reviews which haven't engaged me simply because the entire substance of the review was based around the plot.

Spoilers are a big no-no. When anyone reads a book they don’t want to know how the twists and turns are going to pan out, and if you give away a crucial plot turn then the rest of your review will be largely irrelevant as readers will lose interest in what you have to say. Plot spoilers are simply inconsiderate and unnecessary and will only serve to spoil the enjoyment of anyone else who wants to read the book. An example is a recent review I read, I loved the concept

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