Working On Review Skills

During our weekly meeting we spent time doing a cross-walk of reviews from different publications. We selected the following titles:

• Mockingjay
• Shine
• Chime
• Across the Universe
• Divergent
• Anthem
• The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
• Midnight Palace 
• The Night Circus

Reviews from these titles came from Booklist, School Library Journal, the New York Times, People Magazine, Publisher's Weekly, Horn Book, and a few additional sources.

We read all the reviews for a single title and then recorded our impressions of the differences between the various reviews. Did the author like the book or not, and how was that communicated? Was there greater emphasis on the plot, the author, or the reviewer's opinion? 

After everyone read and reflected on the reviews of two books we compared our impressions of the different review publications. Booklist came out very favorably for hitting a nice balance of plot summary and recommendation.

It will be interesting to see if this influences how our group reviews ARCs, and what that will look like.