Readers vs. Reviewers
Apr. 1st, 2010 09:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoBack on March 23, I mentioned the fact that my book Taking Flight was cut from the ABNA competition after the second round. I more or less expected that, and figured that was the end of what I would hear. However, yesterday I received the "reviews" of two "expert reviewers." I have no idea what "expert" means in this context. I suspect that they are just individuals who have posted lots of those customer reviews on Amazon.
ABNA Expert Reviewer #1
What is the strongest aspect of this excerpt?
This was a highly imaginative piece. The descriptions and prose of the story flowed well and the author did a great job editing the piece so the work flowed very smoothly and was a pleasure to read. This author has a great imagination and I could picture the world that was created. It was an interesting post apocalyptic young adult read about creatures that inhabit the world after the demise of the humans and how they survive with the little that is left.
The author also did a great job editing this piece as there was nothing to note as far as errors in tense or structure. I enjoyed the character of Jake and could feel his longing to fly and his inhibitions regarding leaving his mother. There was a lot of information in the piece that made it very interesting.
I thought the piece was original, fresh and presented some wonderful ideas.
What aspect needs the most work?
What I think could improve this piece is for it to have a little more action to make it more interesting. What I read was more like a series of descriptions to get a sense of the settings and characters but I would have liked to have seen more action to drive the story beyond the descriptions. Descriptive writing is really great but the story behind all of the descriptions needs to be strong enough to carry the story through the back information and setting to tell the story. If the writing is too descriptive and doesn’t move the story forward it tends to get a little boring for the reader. I really liked the piece but there seemed to be something solid lacking in it. I think some of the descriptive sentences could be shorter and stronger so the writing doesn’t lag or drag. Condensing or shortening sentences would be a great idea, or editing out what doesn’t really drive the story with forward momentum would make the piece more engaging to the reader.
What is your overall opinion of this excerpt?
Overall, I did like the excerpt. I thought it was interesting and fresh. The ideas were original and very good. There was a lot of imagination in this piece. The writing overall was good, however the descriptions weighed down the actual story and the descriptions should be edited a little further to make the story stronger. I really liked the concept of the story and thought it was very interesting but I tended to get a little bored with some of the detail surrounding the town and characters. Maybe some of the details could be given in the form of dialog or something to break up the steady stream of descriptions in each paragraph. It was a fun and original piece and I would love to learn more about the characters and story from this author.
ABNA Expert Reviewer #2
What is the strongest aspect of this excerpt?
It's a creative idea, that's for sure. I'll bet I don't run across anything remotely like this in my excerpts. I like the setting in Cairo, Illinois... I just read a piece in Time magazine about the decaying Midwestern town.
I like the author's small observations. In the first two sentences, he/she expresses an idea my spouse always jokes about with me, my ability to remember a page number in a book I'm reading, sans bookmark. I've never seen it mentioned in print. The reader is introduced to the mule idea quietly, with a mention of fuzzy ears. I appreciate the author's subtlety.
What aspect needs the most work?
The Burning Years, Old Times and The Change. Twofer school. Mules, dogs, horses, wolves and cougars acting like people. Amusing, but hard to picture. How exactly do these creatures read, throw balls, can food and make dinner?
The setting is quaint but the idea futuristic, a dichotomy that is hard to reconcile. And most young people of today would find it hard to relate to a farm setting. Farms in my own background ended two generations ago.
What is your overall opinion of this excerpt?
The idea is amusing, but a little too far fetched for me. I have a mild curiosity about what's happened here, but I wouldn't feel like I've missed out on something if I didn't continue reading. But sci-fi and fantasy is not my gig, so another reader might become more involved in the narrative than I did.
I will not quibble with the complaint about description vs. action other than to point out that there is plenty of action even in the first chapters that these reviewers saw. It just isn't the kind of action that they are accustomed to on television or the movie screen, nor in popular best sellers. No one shoots at anyone, or gets caught up in a car chase. Instead we see a series of events, 24 hours in the life of what amounts to a high school student, in a setting that apparently was too hard for one of the reviewers to even conceive of (though actually many authors have presented similar scenery.)
The book does have fast action and even a bit of violence, but these elements build gradually against the peaceful countryside setting. Because the rules required the "excerpt" to be presented from the very beginning of the novel, rather than taken from the middle, there was little I could do about that.
The real irony is in what Reviewer #2 says. He or she likes the setting on the outskirts of Cairo, Illinois, yet later complains that the "rural setting" is too out of date for "modern kids" to identify with. I say that kids who are so limited in their horizons that they can't imagine anything but city streets really need to have those horizons pushed outward to encompass the whole variety of the real world. How will that happen if they aren't exposed to diversity? Isn't that one of the valuable elements of reading overall? I always thought so. Do they think that there are no "rural" places any more? That there are no people who live and work in them (including teenagers going to school?) I have news for them. Even today, Cairo, Illinois is no bustling metropolis. It's a small town, and you can walk to the edge of it and be in the wilds of rural America. That's what made it a good setting for this story, in addition to its reasonable proximity to the geology that forms a major element in the conclusion of the tale.
I do find it irritating that such a competition would give science fiction, which is a recognized genre in the rules, to a reviewer who admits to not being able to grasp or get into the "far fetched" nature of a science fiction story line. Reviewer #1 gave a fair evaluation based on what was available to them. Reviewer #2 was no more competent to evaluate this piece of writing than I would be to judge Scotch, given that I don't drink distilled liquors at all. The difference is that I have the good sense to decline to express an "opinion" about single malts and would instead disqualify myself.
ABNA Expert Reviewer #1
What is the strongest aspect of this excerpt?
This was a highly imaginative piece. The descriptions and prose of the story flowed well and the author did a great job editing the piece so the work flowed very smoothly and was a pleasure to read. This author has a great imagination and I could picture the world that was created. It was an interesting post apocalyptic young adult read about creatures that inhabit the world after the demise of the humans and how they survive with the little that is left.
The author also did a great job editing this piece as there was nothing to note as far as errors in tense or structure. I enjoyed the character of Jake and could feel his longing to fly and his inhibitions regarding leaving his mother. There was a lot of information in the piece that made it very interesting.
I thought the piece was original, fresh and presented some wonderful ideas.
What aspect needs the most work?
What I think could improve this piece is for it to have a little more action to make it more interesting. What I read was more like a series of descriptions to get a sense of the settings and characters but I would have liked to have seen more action to drive the story beyond the descriptions. Descriptive writing is really great but the story behind all of the descriptions needs to be strong enough to carry the story through the back information and setting to tell the story. If the writing is too descriptive and doesn’t move the story forward it tends to get a little boring for the reader. I really liked the piece but there seemed to be something solid lacking in it. I think some of the descriptive sentences could be shorter and stronger so the writing doesn’t lag or drag. Condensing or shortening sentences would be a great idea, or editing out what doesn’t really drive the story with forward momentum would make the piece more engaging to the reader.
What is your overall opinion of this excerpt?
Overall, I did like the excerpt. I thought it was interesting and fresh. The ideas were original and very good. There was a lot of imagination in this piece. The writing overall was good, however the descriptions weighed down the actual story and the descriptions should be edited a little further to make the story stronger. I really liked the concept of the story and thought it was very interesting but I tended to get a little bored with some of the detail surrounding the town and characters. Maybe some of the details could be given in the form of dialog or something to break up the steady stream of descriptions in each paragraph. It was a fun and original piece and I would love to learn more about the characters and story from this author.
ABNA Expert Reviewer #2
What is the strongest aspect of this excerpt?
It's a creative idea, that's for sure. I'll bet I don't run across anything remotely like this in my excerpts. I like the setting in Cairo, Illinois... I just read a piece in Time magazine about the decaying Midwestern town.
I like the author's small observations. In the first two sentences, he/she expresses an idea my spouse always jokes about with me, my ability to remember a page number in a book I'm reading, sans bookmark. I've never seen it mentioned in print. The reader is introduced to the mule idea quietly, with a mention of fuzzy ears. I appreciate the author's subtlety.
What aspect needs the most work?
The Burning Years, Old Times and The Change. Twofer school. Mules, dogs, horses, wolves and cougars acting like people. Amusing, but hard to picture. How exactly do these creatures read, throw balls, can food and make dinner?
The setting is quaint but the idea futuristic, a dichotomy that is hard to reconcile. And most young people of today would find it hard to relate to a farm setting. Farms in my own background ended two generations ago.
What is your overall opinion of this excerpt?
The idea is amusing, but a little too far fetched for me. I have a mild curiosity about what's happened here, but I wouldn't feel like I've missed out on something if I didn't continue reading. But sci-fi and fantasy is not my gig, so another reader might become more involved in the narrative than I did.
I will not quibble with the complaint about description vs. action other than to point out that there is plenty of action even in the first chapters that these reviewers saw. It just isn't the kind of action that they are accustomed to on television or the movie screen, nor in popular best sellers. No one shoots at anyone, or gets caught up in a car chase. Instead we see a series of events, 24 hours in the life of what amounts to a high school student, in a setting that apparently was too hard for one of the reviewers to even conceive of (though actually many authors have presented similar scenery.)
The book does have fast action and even a bit of violence, but these elements build gradually against the peaceful countryside setting. Because the rules required the "excerpt" to be presented from the very beginning of the novel, rather than taken from the middle, there was little I could do about that.
The real irony is in what Reviewer #2 says. He or she likes the setting on the outskirts of Cairo, Illinois, yet later complains that the "rural setting" is too out of date for "modern kids" to identify with. I say that kids who are so limited in their horizons that they can't imagine anything but city streets really need to have those horizons pushed outward to encompass the whole variety of the real world. How will that happen if they aren't exposed to diversity? Isn't that one of the valuable elements of reading overall? I always thought so. Do they think that there are no "rural" places any more? That there are no people who live and work in them (including teenagers going to school?) I have news for them. Even today, Cairo, Illinois is no bustling metropolis. It's a small town, and you can walk to the edge of it and be in the wilds of rural America. That's what made it a good setting for this story, in addition to its reasonable proximity to the geology that forms a major element in the conclusion of the tale.
I do find it irritating that such a competition would give science fiction, which is a recognized genre in the rules, to a reviewer who admits to not being able to grasp or get into the "far fetched" nature of a science fiction story line. Reviewer #1 gave a fair evaluation based on what was available to them. Reviewer #2 was no more competent to evaluate this piece of writing than I would be to judge Scotch, given that I don't drink distilled liquors at all. The difference is that I have the good sense to decline to express an "opinion" about single malts and would instead disqualify myself.
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no subject
Date: 2010-04-02 10:21 am (UTC)The setting is quaint but the idea futuristic, a dichotomy that is hard to reconcile. And most young people of today would find it hard to relate to a farm setting.
So call me old-fashioned (or anachronistic), and most certainly old(er), but one of the reasons I liked reading Bradbury was that I enjoyed those farm scenes and rural settings he employed so nicely as backdrop to his futuristic stories.
Our SF/F is actually contained within the YA area of the library, separate from "Adult Fiction." I really shouldn't discuss patrons' tastes and appetites, but a casual observation is that most of this genre is taken out by adults, and most are over 40. This location is in direct contrast to where 'new fiction' resides, and SF/F is intermingled among the Danielle Steels and Janet Evanovichs.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-02 11:38 am (UTC)Our SF&F circulation here is low, except for the film and television spin offs. I keep trying to promote it and feature both classics and stellar new work but to little avail. Our biggest users seem to be voracious consumers of James Patterson and Nora Roberts. (Gag me with a bookmark!)
There are anomalies, of course, such as Stephenie Meyer and Laurell Hamilton with their vampire books. For the most part, though, the genre has few followers in Harvard. Our new book display is divided by genre, so the SF writers don't have to rub shoulders with Danielle Steel. They are lodged next to the mystery writers, who are extremely popular for the most part. Once retired from new books, though, they are relegated to the corner of the library farthest from the doors, next to the newspapers and periodicals. They lost their better position a couple of years ago, when they were displaced by the "gentle reads" collection. Sigh. I have difficulty even getting readers for Ursula Le Guin or Isaac Asimov.
(I don't see any issue with discussing popularity or patron tastes as long as no individual names are given. In fact, I keep toying with the idea of a statistical study based on circulation figures, using only age and gender to group patrons.)
no subject
Date: 2010-04-02 09:27 pm (UTC)I guess it does give you some information, in that if you wanted to reach readers, here are the barriers to them. I would guess they weren't the ones you were reaching for. Anyway, the first reader's comments seem encouraging, at least.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-02 09:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-02 09:54 pm (UTC)In this case though, a reader with that particular world view obviously should not be chosen to review anyone's science fiction. It is too "far fetched" for them to get their mind around.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-14 09:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-14 11:34 am (UTC)