I’m watching an expert on birdhouses. (I’m not really; this is a metaphor.) The expert has a spec sheet on what is required to make an appropriate birdhouse, and is evaluating an object that has been placed in front of him—or her, I’m not fussy. The expert has gone down the list and painstakingly demonstrated that there is no perch in front, no hole for entry and exit for the birds, and no space inside for the eggs and nestlings. “This object,” the expert says, “is a complete failure as a birdhouse.”
And I’m thinking, “Well, I can see that, but it’s meant to be a music box.”
I feel that way sometimes with reviews of books. Actually, I have that experience much more frequently with movie reviews. Movie reviewers seem eager to show off how much insider knowledge they have, so they love to review the movie that didn’t get made. With book reviewers, it seems to be about disappointment that the book didn’t turn out to be what you wanted, and by that I mean, you thought it was a thriller and it was a procedural, or you wanted high fantasy and you got urban fantasy instead.
I wrote some comments on a Dan Brown book a few months back and I talked about this. I would not pick a Dan Brown book if I wanted to immerse myself in lush, exquisite, playful language; or if I wanted to spend time with characters who engaged or intrigued me; or if I wanted to learn something I didn’t know. I’d pick up a Dan Brown if I wanted a lot of action, good travelogue and a few puzzles; therefore, those are the elements I have to review a Dan Brown book on.
Last week I had a different kind of experience with reviewing the book that isn’t there. It was less about category and more about the “spec sheet” idea. I was procrastinating on my NaNoWriMo words, and trolling the internet for reviews of a book called Indigo Springs, which I’d just finished and enjoyed. (Another book Terry introduced to me!) One blogger had a review, and it was plain they had a checklist of items a book had to have in order to be good. All readers have that checklist, but for some of us the items are: sentences, characters who engage us, a plausible premise, real conflict, vivid description, moral integrity, and stuff like that.
This reviewer’s checklist included; Characters of Color, abbreviated as CoC, so apparently this designation is not limited to this one blogger; LGBT characters, Differently Abled characters. I didn’t read the whole review so there may have been others.
Despite the fact that the main character in Indigo Springs is bisexual, which got the book points, Indigo Springs failed this reader’s test because it wasn’t clear whether any of the main characters are brown-skinned, and because the writer refers to a subplot where the white settlers ambushed and murdered a bunch of the local tribal people, because the writer didn’t name the tribe. Okay, fair’s fair; the book is set in eastern Oregon and it wouldn’t have taken much to name the tribe.
The reviewer also complains because the writer dares to lump all Native American shamans together in their approach to the magic-killers who come from Europe, instead of acknowledging the diversity of the tribal peoples who live here. She takes the, “How condescending; ‘Gee, Natives are so magical and special’” approach. And the only problem with that attitude is that the writer kind of needs this thing to happen in order to power her plot. If she had chosen to have the early European settlers, fleeing from magic-killers, make the choices that hide the magic in the “unreal,” no doubt this reviewer would have whinged about how the native peoples and their spiritual dimension were totally ignored. The book is just not a good birdhouse, as far as she’s concerned.
Maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe the writer did enter her music-box book into a birdhouse contest, in which case, it should fail as a birdhouse, or at least be a very poor one. It seems more likely though that this writer had written birdhouses before, and may even have a reputation for birdhouses, and the reviewer, steeped in birdhouse lore, is reduced to staring at the music box, prodding it ( jumping when it chimes) and saying, “That’s no birdhouse.”
Which bring me to me, and what I’ve learned. What I took away from this review was that I need to be clear when I’m commenting on a book about what I expected and what I got. For instance, there are several male writers whose books I read who, in my opinion, do not write very convincing women characters. I know that going in. I read some literary writers who make me crazy because they ignore fundamental rules of everyday living (like paying rent, showing up once in a while at your job, etc) in order to tweak their plots to get the book to go where they need it to go. For that one, I really do have to set a threshold, but at least I know it’s my pet peeve.
I do think it’s fair to say, “Here’s what I wanted the book to be, and here’s what it was. I wanted a birdhouse, and got a music box instead.” At least this way I won’t trash the music box just because it won’t hold chickadees.