Book review should include

Once you have made your observations and assessments of the work under review, carefully survey your notes and attempt to unify your impressions into a statement that will describe the purpose or thesis of your review.

Check out our handout on thesis statements. Then, outline the arguments that support your thesis. Your arguments should develop the thesis in a logical manner. The relative emphasis depends on the nature of the review: if readers may be more interested in the work itself, you may want to make the work and the author more prominent; if you want the review to be about your perspective and opinions, then you may structure the review to privilege your observations over but never separate from those of the work under review.

What follows is just one of many ways to organize a review. Since most reviews are brief, many writers begin with a catchy quip or anecdote that succinctly delivers their argument. But you can introduce your review differently depending on the argument and audience.

In general, you should include:. This should be brief, as analysis takes priority. The necessary amount of summary also depends on your audience.

Graduate students, beware! If, on the other hand, your audience has already read the book—such as a class assignment on the same work—you may have more liberty to explore more subtle points and to emphasize your own argument. See our handout on summary for more tips. Your analysis and evaluation should be organized into paragraphs that deal with single aspects of your argument.

This arrangement can be challenging when your purpose is to consider the book as a whole, but it can help you differentiate elements of your criticism and pair assertions with evidence more clearly. You do not necessarily need to work chronologically through the book as you discuss it. Given the argument you want to make, you can organize your paragraphs more usefully by themes, methods, or other elements of the book.

If you find it useful to include comparisons to other books, keep them brief so that the book under review remains in the spotlight. Avoid excessive quotation and give a specific page reference in parentheses when you do quote. Is this the 16th book in a series that was starting to grow stale, and you were pleasantly surprised by some new characters? Most review sites provide a star rating system. Let your audience know your rationale for choosing a particular rating.

We still want to hear from you! Let us know what you want to know how to write! Real-time suggestions, wherever you write.

Our instincts are usually right: the line is a stinker. It takes humility to give your opinions the stress test, but your writing will inevitably improve as a result. Self-flattering literary references. I get it, you want to justify being in a position of judgment by establishing your literary bona fides and use the highfalutin reference as a tool to leverage your legitimacy. The thing is, you can spot these a mile away and it typically has the opposite effect.

Often they have only the most tenuous relevance to the point at hand. Their only purpose is to show the reader that you are a reviewer with a breadth of knowledge at which the rest of us can only gape in wonder. What they actually show is that you can do a Quotables search for mentions of willow trees hello, Ophelia!

Increased diversity and more equitable representation in the lit world are unquestionably positive developments. And, obviously, vice versa. The same goes for queer lit. Most general-interest journals are read by all kinds of people. Creating a pleasing, energizing flow for a piece of writing is a fine art, and book criticism has its own natural patterns. Bookending your piece anecdotally and thematically, with a kicker that cleverly calls back to your opening, is wise and satisfying, while frontloading plot exposition and reserving the back half mainly for critical analysis is a good, blunt structure.

By all means be creative, but the key is for the plot concerns to merge and re-merge with the critical concerns in a way that propels them all forward equally and efficiently in a single, coherent current.

And a review that frontloads a mass of critical analysis leaves the reader lost without a narrative context and characters to apply it to. In making reference to the potential reader of the novel and reader of the review , too often the reviewer uses a mix of pronouns that is disorienting. The reader is forced to stop and ask, Who are you talking to again? First of all, unmitigated praise is logically absurd.

Every work of writing has its weaknesses, especially once personal tastes are factored in. Third, how does it help your reader to gush all over a book with no larger context about how it compares to other works of this type, with no comment on stylistic mannerisms, dialogue, language, pacing, structure, setting, characterization, narrative coherence, or emotional authenticity? The corollary to this is that a reflexively malicious pan fueled by creative envy is cruel and disingenuous.

This is an easy one. Here are the instructions of how to enable JavaScript in your browser. Donate now to send a festive book gift to a child who is vulnerable or in care and light up their Christmas.

Donate now. Author Luisa Plaja offers her top tips for how to write a brilliant review of the latest book you read - whether you liked it or not. Other readers will always be interested in your opinion of the books you've read. Whether you've loved the book or not, if you give your honest and detailed thoughts then people will find new books that are right for them.

If you're stuck on what to say in a review, it can help to imagine you're talking to someone who's asking you whether they should read the book.

But without giving any spoilers or revealing plot twists! As a general rule, try to avoid writing in detail about anything that happens from about the middle of the book onwards.

If the book is part of a series, it can be useful to mention this, and whether you think you'd need to have read other books in the series to enjoy this one. Focus on your thoughts and feelings about the story and the way it was told.

You could try answering a couple of the following questions:. Summarise some of your thoughts on the book by suggesting the type of reader you'd recommend the book to.