You hit the nail head-on, baby. There's a huge difference between a hatchet job on a book and simply pointing out that specific parts of the book didn't work for you, personally. I think this difference a lot of times can be chalked up to the difference between reviewing and criticizing a book, where the latter definition is where you take the time to pull apart what does and doesn't make the book work; you contextualize it as part of a larger framework. In this case, the larger framework is the views of one reader, but in another it might be the genre field the book's published in, or how other critics are responding to it. I basically want more from a book review than "I liked it!" or "I hated it."


I believe that all books have an audience. I might not be that audience but that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of people out there who fully enjoy a book that I don't.

Would you mind if I quoted this in an article I'm writing on the virtue of negative book reviews?