Deni Dietz's QUIBBLES & BITS
Responding to critics of Carnal Knowledge, Mike Nichols said, "A critic at a movie is a eumuch at a gangbang."
Which made me think. . . How many times have we banged our heads against our keyboards because the person who reviewed our books didn't "get it"?
Or, even worse, didn't read it!
Or was just plain nasty.
When my historical romance Dream Dancer came out, a reviewer whom we'll call "Ms. Axtogrind" attacked me, personally (in print, of course), then said the hero of my book had burned to death in a circus fire. I don't think I'm giving anything away when I say my hero did not die. Ms. Axtogrind was fired shortly thereafter, but I'm fairly certain her review impacted my sales. I mean, would you read a romance where one of the protagonists burns to death? Joan of Arc, maybe.
I threw the question up for grabs on some of my email loops. The have-you-ever-had-a-quirky-or-nasty-review question, not the would-you-read-a-romance-where-the-protag-meets-a-fiery-death question, and I've culled some of my favorites:
Jack Williamson, a science fiction author, got a review which said he wrote like a comic strip writer. Someone saw that and hired Williamson to write a sciece fiction comic strip called "Beyond Mars."
Author Tod Goldberg says: "Sadly, the fine folks at PW have not yet been kind enough to provide me with the home address of the person who wrote of my debut novel, Fake Liar Cheat: 'Goldberg's smarmy, self-congratulatory debut novel breaks little new ground in its quest to debunk shallow American notions of celebrity, materialism and self-fulfillment.'"
PW wrote much nicer things about Tod's next book, but he says, "In my heart, Publishers Weekly will always be the people who notified the world that I was smarmy and self-congratulatory. And I thought I did that pretty well by myself."
Writing about John Westermann's novel, Exit Wounds, a reviewer said: "Clearly the author has never been inside a police station. His policemen are vulgar and crass."
Westermann, who spent 21 years as a cop, says, "Crass and vulgar? Some of my people considered it an art form."
Greg Herren says: "The one thing the reviewer harped on (regarding Murder in the Rue Dauphine) was that 'outside of the main character, Herron doesn't get inside the heads of his characters. It would have been nice to know what was going on inside their heads as well.' Considering the fact that the novel was written in first-person and the main character wasn't a psychic, I kind of scratched my head over that one."
In a review of an anthology of Civil War spy stories, the reviewer assumed Patti (P.G.) Nagle's story was a romance because it its title, The Courtship of Captain Swenk. "He obviously hadn't read the story," Patti says, "because it wasn't romantic at all. The Captain is courting an old battleaxe widow as an excuse for spying activities."
Janet Dawson's PW review for Where the Bodies are Buried sniped at her because her heroine/sleuth, Jeri Howard, didn't figure out who the killer was until the end of the book. "As though there would have been a rest of the book if Jeri had figured out whodunit in the middle," Janet says. "Please! That was the most idiotic hatchet job I've ever seen."
The same week the New York Times called Robert Rosenberg's first book, Crimes of the City, the most notable thriller of 1991, the reviewer in Ha'arentz said it was a cartoon.
"But I think the reviewer issue should be put in perspective," Robert insists. "While my agent was trying to sell my first book, I kept asking for the rejections and she kept saying no. Finally, after she found a publisher (Simon & Shuster), she sent me a sampling (of the rejections). One editor wrote: 'The plotting is elegant, the writing pedestrian, and the characters are flat.' Another editor wrote: 'The writing is elegant, the plotting pedestrian, and the characters are lively.' And a third wrote that the writing was flat, the characters interesting, and the plotting terrific. In other words, one can only wonder if they read the same book!"
And finally, reviewer Joe Scarpato says, "I love writing reviews most when I either love the book or hate the book. The in-betweens are the hardest to write. . . although I try to make each review entertaining as well as informative."
His favorite pan was a one-word summation of A.A. Milne's The Red House Mystery. Joe simply wrote "Pooh!"
