examples of book reviews

examples of book reviews

Exploring the Art of Writing Persuasive Book Reviews

1. Introduction to Book Reviews

The purpose of a book review is essentially to provide an informed review of a book’s various elements. To write a book review requires, first and foremost, a consideration of knowledge about a book coupled with a response that is broad and prepared. The skill of a good reviewer is embedded in their ability to handle these numerous literary layers while writing for potentially varied readers’ interests. This craft is both complex and multifaceted, and it is advisable for a person new to writing book reviews to work their way slowly through a range of new titles, firstly without the need to formally review them, and then look for opportunities to try their hand at creating a complete review.

Experienced book reviewers expand their skills. As they learn how to navigate and successfully work with different literary forms, from novels and short stories to poetry and plays, they usually work on becoming clear, thoughtful, and nuanced in their writing. They also tend to become adept at not letting the dark woods of literary analysis block the pleasure that first drew them to books. A good book review can be a highly enjoyable literary offering. Some people do not want to know much about the potential contents of a book, either as a protection against spoilers or because they prefer to remain totally receptive. The best book reviews will encourage these readers to wait a while before reading the details of the reviews.

2. Elements of a Well-Crafted Book Review

3. Text insider or expanded information and relationship to teach component of review – How did the tenor feed and behavior to simplify your escape from the unexpected happen? Who else is involved and what do they bring?

2. Front matter (extract from natural Sexie divided into three parts) – Not applicable if the excerpt leads the review.

1. Book title with intrinsic appeal (5 Ws and How) – Who, What, When, Where, Why, and/or How of the scene-setting or lead-up to the main question or series of questions filmed by the book. Strategically, supportive images can help the leaner attention, provide introspection, and compel action. What specifically is controversial, so-called ‘clicky,’ original or paradigmatic about the setting within the book?

When writing a book review, it’s crucial to structure the information in a manner that potential readers can scan easily to help them quickly decide whether the book might be right for them. This quick visual scanning also is helpful to reviewers who can look for the most effective places within the review to embed their affiliate links for the bookseller of their choice, particularly when placed within both the first and last paragraphs of the review.

The components of a well-crafted book review are meant to inform others about the details of the books they are considering reading. Sometimes, the review form may offer specific prompts that structure the creation of these components. Other times, reviewers may need to create these components using their own knowledge of the genre. While the prompts can vary, based on the specific review opportunity settings, there are parameters that should be included in a well-crafted review.

3. Strategies for Writing Persuasive Book Reviews

It is extremely important for reviewers to develop a reader-friendly format for their reviews in order to facilitate the browsing activity and use of the reviews. This makes life easy for busy readers of reviews who are likely to be at least as eager as casual bookshop browsers or library or bookstore visitors to move through and between too many books as quickly as possible. Furthermore, helpful comments in this section of the review are likely to add significantly to the persuasiveness of the review. On the basis of close inspection of readers’ and reviewers’ needs and selective help for the future needs of reviewers, we can define the aims and agenda for a follow-on study of alternative tactics for persuading people that a book is a good buy.

The success of a review is stemming directly from the articulateness and persuasiveness of the reviews. The generally low quality of online reviews suggests that other reviewers might also benefit from explicit instructions for maximizing the persuasiveness and impact of their reviews. The extract highlights the most important strategies we have found for producing persuasive reviews. In order to be as convincing a reviewer as possible, it is essential to show other readers of the review the truth in the subjective claims you make about the book and the good reasons for those claims. In other words, review articulateness and persuasiveness depend on the sound analogy between the text about the book – short, clear, and written with the interests of readers of reviews and the reviewer – and the facts about the book, including, if necessary, quotations.

4. Analyzing and Critiquing Book Reviews

The implied author responds persuasively and critically to some specific aspect of the work. The specificity of this response locates the reading response in the domain of art criticism or analysis, overshadowing the psychological, sociocultural, and pluralistic factors that produce a variety of critic-artifact interaction. Furthermore, this critical perspective reflects the implied author’s ethics, ideology, and institutional beliefs, satisfying his or her personal evaluation of the implied author. Consequently, this complex transaction combines a personal response with a logical and descriptive plan for textual analysis that produces an eloquently persuasive critique. The result is a meaningful critical essay.

Using the rules of critical analysis we developed earlier in this chapter, we can dissect, criticize, and reform productive book reviews. Because reading is a creative act in which the reader plays a psychological role – he or she brings the characters, setting, and action to life within the theater of the mind – each reader who approaches a book is a collaborative artist with the work’s author. Each has a unique and personal interpretation of a general text, as we learned from our earlier discussion of textuality and validity. Therefore readers find individual satisfaction in understanding their particular relationship to the artistic work of the author, both as they interpret the work and as they respond to or reject that interpretation. Their reviews of books become reflective documents that express the intensity of their response to, as well as their emotional and ideological commitment to, the work. Because each review deals with how a reader responded emotionally, it combines that reader’s subjective affect with that respondent’s critical insight, asserting personal values in a way that is public, replicable, and persuasive.

5. Conclusion and Tips for Aspiring Reviewers

How does one write a review that is both fair and persuasive, that keeps it in the bounds of high academic and ethical standards? We note a tension in what is required of the successful book (and in the quality of publications themselves): on one hand, it must be a work of intelligence, clearly written and addressing an important issue in an original and thought-provoking way; on the other, it must convince all these subjects in 1,000-2,000 words. To produce a good book review, then, requires that we provide a good overview of the book. The most interesting ones tend to come from the better-respected and more influential reviewers, who are (hopefully) more motivated by a desire to be read than are lesser mortals.

Reviewing is an excellent way to keep abreast of the major works and contemporary trends in one’s academic area. Comparative review pieces and broad, argumentative review essays often provide major developments in research agendas or provide significant comments on intellectual shifts. Writing reviews is both a major academic responsibility and an important professional development activity. Book review publications are not only very necessary, but also exquisitely pleasurable to read. As aspiring academics, then, we are in a good position to become experienced and eloquent book reviewers, the best of whom will become trusted and influential guides to the works of which they write. We are in a strong position to help ensure that some of the extraordinary books around every year are seen to be thus.