Writing Book Reviews

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Authors & Contributors

Back to Form and Technique

• Description (gives impressions, creates mood)-imagination and aesthetics; sense appeal.
• Dominant impression; vividness of final impression.
• Selection of details to support a single effect.
• Appeal to sight, sound, smell, taste, and feel; imagery.
• Directness; implication and suggestion.
• Narration (relates characters or events in time)-often chronological.
• Point of view; first, second, third; limited or omniscient.
• Establishment of setting.
• Smoothness of transitions in time sequence.
• Use of flashback.
• Characterization (develops characters)-types; individuals.
• How presented or introduced.
• Motivations; sources for feeling and/or drives to action.
• How described; direct or implied; revealed through description or dialogue.
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• Purposes; heroic or villainous; tragic inner flaws; revealing traits.
• How credible and consistent.
• Plot (develops characters and action)-movement; tension.
• Opening situation and/or conflict.
• Obstacles and complications.
• Tension and suspense.
• Turning point, or climax.
• Resolution.
• Degree of inventiveness and/or plausibility.
• Final philosophy or view of life derived from characters and action.

Depending on the author's purpose, a book's realism, or truth to life, may need assessment. If a book of fiction is meant to be realistic fiction-is it? Is it logical, natural, plausible? To what extent does the author rely on coincidence or accident to propel the plot? Is there adequate evidence of character motivation? Or a lack of sufficient urges and drives? Is the story infused with a quality of normalcy, or abnormality? Remember, if a book of fiction is to be successful according to a reviewer, it is not necessarily realistic fiction; a book's realism, or lack thereof, need be addressed by a reviewer only as it compares to the author's intention for the story.

See here how David Milofsky addresses the realism of William Trevor's novel The Story of Lucy Gault: "It seems unlikely, to say the least, that longtime residents of a place (going back several generations, we're told) would cut off contact so completely as the Gaults do, but, of course, if this isn't the case there would be no novel. Similarly, it's hard to believe that the lawyer wouldn't be able to contrive a way to contact the absent parents . . . It's a tribute to Trevor's genius that these objections are largely overridden and storytelling takes over."