To The Person Who Wrote a Two-Word Two-Star Goodreads Review About My 84,791 Word Novel

Or - I'm tired of people telling writers not to respond to glib, petty, shallow, reductive, or mean-spirited reviews of their books

Some background: I don’t have anything against one-star or two-star reviews in principle. In my next installment, I may even share some examples of thoughtful one- and two-star reviews of my work. Yes, readers need a space to discuss books. No, readers are not entitled to a place where they can bash, in a permanent and public forum, writers or their books without writers ever saying a word in response. Something no longer feels okay about the insistence that I must allow whomever to treat my books as a public punching bag and do so with my mouth taped shut. When we tell writers to just ignore these kinds of reviews, I think we’re encouraging an uncivil and one-sided public discourse about literature, a discourse often written by people who don’t seem to understand that dissatisfaction or even intense hatred in a book review generally says more about the reader than the book.¹ So more to come. But let’s start here.

This seems like an appropriate mood photo, taken during the filming of my unboxing video for Portalmania. Because this is kind of what it feels like to be an author who is reading their book reviews on Goodreads.

Dear X.Y.,

In the writing workshops I once attended back when I was a young writer, we were always told to remain quiet while our peers offered us feedback on our creative work. This process, though imperfect, was ultimately successful in teaching me how to doubt that I knew what I was doing when it came to my own writing. That sort of uncertainty took me many years to undo. So it’s funny to find myself, decades later, presumably a more experienced writer, yet I’m still being given similar advice about holding my tongue and remaining quiet during discussions of my work—though this time it’s with regard to reader reviews.

Look, I know I’m not supposed to read Goodreads reviews of my writing.² Writers have been told this by every angle of the internet³ as well as by common sense. And if we, God forbid, read those reviews, we should not, under any circumstances, respond to the negative ones. Nobody wants to hear an author complain that people didn’t like their book. But common sense be damned. Today, because I was feeling down already about the state of this country and of the world and also the state of my writing career, I decided to read through all the one- and two-star reviews of my novel.

Listen, I don’t know if you’re an author yourself, X.Y., but if you are, I have to recommend you do this for an afternoon activity, especially if you’re prone, as I am, to low self-esteem or depression. Many people in the one- and two-star camp, after admitting they read only 30 pages or 110 pages or 20% or 62% of my book, decided to outline, often in detail, my novel’s shortcomings in the parts they actually read. Their writing is specific and opinionated. I especially savored the reviews where they wrote about me.

Take this one by E.F. “I kept waiting for the writer [that’s me] to show up to her own book. But when she started narrating her own bougie recipes terribly so we would be really clear it was not her narrating but instead a suicidal messed up teenager with no voice and absolutely no character because she gave her no character? No, just no.” (I have to admire the adamant passion here, the insistence that I should not have written my book the way I wanted to.)

So why am I directing this letter to you? Why not to E.F. who really did not like that recipe I included in my novel, or G.H. ("It's a turgid and confusing work..."), or I.J. ("I gave up on this depressing, irritatingly-written book..."), or K.L. ("Dumb. Ok. Shouldn't have wasted my time...")?

I’m writing to you, X.Y., because amid this torrent of words, your review stood out to me, as you did not go on and on like others did. You did not elaborate. You did not vent or summarize. You simply typed, in what I imagine to be your usual precision, two words: “Too depressing!”⁴

I wonder what you had expected from a near future novel about climate change and human extinction. Did you think the imagined deaths of billions of people would be fun? Like a fun adventure? I don’t blame you if you did. The entertainment industry has, for years, approached apocalyptic narratives as a money-making franchise, an opportunity for heroism, survival, and fun. (Spoiler alert: actual apocalypses will not be fun.)

Still, I’m worried about you, X.Y. If you consider my book to be too depressing, I worry about your ability to handle the actual future. Because have you looked outside? Or read the news? Or kept up with the decline of the U.S. butterfly population or really the entire world population of insects? Or read The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming which David Wallace-Wells begins by stating, “It is worse, much worse, than you think,” then he goes on to describe dying oceans, unbreathable air, economic collapse, wildfire, rising waters, and unbearable heat? Things don’t look so good.

Though maybe you’re fully aware of the trajectory of this warming planet, a planet that is also currently swerving toward authoritarianism and isolationism and drill baby drill, but you expect literature to be a bastion from reality, a place where you can go and have a good time. I worry this sort of feel-good insistence shortchanges the power of books. If we can’t handle an utterly dark fictional realism on paper, how are we going to have the resilience to handle the actual dark future, full of smoky skies, and mega-disasters, and climate refugees, and dead birds, and dead butterflies, and dead amphibians, and dead trees, and dead—

I forgot this is supposed to be an entertaining letter. Two stars for me. Let’s turn this frown upside down. Or maybe that’s part of the problem, our need to be constantly entertained while the world and our future literally burns.

With much love and pessimism,

D.U.
Writer of bleak literature

1. I wrote about this idea of reader-book mismatch in my own Goodreads review of After World. Here’s the IG post about it.

2. From https://www.goodreads.com/author/guidelines: “Don't engage with people who negatively rate or review your books. We cannot stress this enough. Goodreads is a community for all readers to express their honest opinions about the books they choose to read and shelve. Engaging with people who don't like your book will not win you any new readers. Remember that Goodreads is a public space; other readers will see a reaction from the author and interpret it as hostile regardless of how carefully the response was crafted.”

3. There are so many places that talk about why authors should not respond to bad Goodreads reviews. This Bustle article is a pretty good round-up. Book Riot also goes into it from the Goodreads reviewer angle.

4. Originally I included this catty paragraph - it’s kind of mean, so I’m burying it in a footnote. I know, one of the points of this little piece is don’t be mean in public. But also please realize I wrote this after reading EVERY SINGLE ONE AND TWO STAR REVIEW OF MY NOVEL. I think I deserve to be a little mean.
”Here’s what I appreciated about your turn of phrase: the exclamation point, for starters. Such optional punctuation required not only an additional movement of your fingers but an additional investment of your time: the pressing of shift, the pressing of the number one, the letting go of the number one, the letting go of shift. I am grateful that you included a capital letter as well, as that requires—and we both must know this at a very deep level, as my book contained 21,877 capital letters—an additional press and release of the shift key. I do not take that for granted.”