Ocean's Gift by Demelza Carlton

I liked Water and Fire, but I loved Ocean’s Gift. It was fascinating seeing Belinda in her mermaid setting, as I had got to know her in the first novel even though I knew little of her background. But in this novel, I adored the character of Vanessa. She had an innocence and yet a matriarchal power that was really enticing. I felt as though there was an opportunity to really get to know her. Demelza Carlton has struck the perfect balance between the archetypal view of mermaids and that of the sirens of old, blending the two to make a tender and yet dangerous species of females.

The storyline is awesome and frighteningly plausible. The earth is dying and nature will have seen the tell-tale signs long before man pulls his head out of the TV and realises it.

Joe is a decent man in a world full of typically bawdy males. He is solid and honourable and bashful without losing any of his sex appeal. He is reassuringly male without the unappealing baseness of the other fishermen, which is probably why Vanessa picks him. The mermaid race seeks liaison with men as a duty, but Vanessa is different. She has previously known love and it presents a vulnerability within an otherwise fearsome character portrayal.

I love how truly Australian this novel is. It has all the raw beauty of a stunning corner of the world. I appreciated the descriptions of the geography and the oceans; they were colourful and well-drawn and made the reader feel as though they were taking part in the novel. I was there in Joe’s hut and Vanessa’s boat. I liked this novel enough to read it in one sitting, not wanting to put it down and miss anything. It had enough of a hold on me, to keep me from doing the myriad other things that I actually should have been doing and I felt sad when the last page had been finished and savoured. I would have felt more devastated, had I not known that there were other books in the series to pick up.

It was incredibly well written and refreshing clean editorially - not a single distracting flaw to spoil the reading experience. I would definitely recommend it.

Get your own copy of Demelza's awesome book on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Oceans-Gift-Demelza-Carlton-ebook/dp/B00AFEO80O/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1403333968&sr=8-1&keywords=Ocean%27s+Gift

KEEPING IT REAL - Giving the reader the benefit of your real-life experience.

I read a novel once which contained a foreword by the author and referred to a week that she had spent in the bush doing research. I sat back and began reading, excited to see her experiences drifting through the pages at me. I was severely disappointed. By the end of the book, her lead male had made a fire without matches and built a small bush hut. That was it. She had literally spent a week living rough for a few lines about how delightful it was and how clever her man could be.

  

Whilst writing my latest work, I sent my two main characters into the New Zealand bush, on Mount Pirongia to be exact. I was keen not to make the same mistake and so I used my own experience to hopefully put the reader into that situation. The bush is beautiful and challenging and utterly terrifying. It is not the kind of place that you can afford to disrespect. I hope that I have managed to get that across.

The first night I ever spent in the bush was up in the Kaimai Ranges in the middle of a wintry July. It was a Youth Search and Rescue event and I was accompanying my fourteen year old daughter on a Parent Camp, having drawn a very short straw.

Let’s make this clear. I am a 5* hotel kind of girl. I don’t do camping.

Yet there I was, waking up in a tent packed with snoring adults of both genders, fervently telling myself that I didn’t need the toilet. Unfortunately, I did and let me tell you, once you’re out of the tent, there ain’t no point trying to crawl back in again. It was freezing cold and into the minus figures and the promise of home and bed felt like the Holy Grail. We had camped next to an elderly scout hut with a toilet and freezing cold running water, but that, I am reliably informed, was a luxury.

My daughter had joined this motley band of crazies a few weeks after her fourteenth birthday and they trained rigorously every second weekend on any of the mountain ranges surrounding Hamilton. Over a period of three years, she morphed from an outdoor loving teenager into a finely honed machine, able to survive alone in the bush for days, navigate anywhere with an ordinance survey map and compass, track and find, administer first aid to and rescue unfortunates who found themselves lost. By the age of sixteen, she was carrying a pager and responded to search calls, even leaving school to do so. As parents, we were so proud. But then in the middle of each year...there was Parent Camp.

The first year, I went off on a ‘tramp’ with an older boy and another parent. We chose a short track, because I am not a fan of deeply wooded areas and as we discovered half way around, the other poor mother was three months pregnant and but for her husband being called away, shouldn’t have been crawling, knee deep in vines and bush matter anyway. We had radios and a GPS, not that we were allowed to cheat, tempting as it was and we were being monitored back at base by a group of third years which must have found our weaving coloured line absolutely hilarious.

All of the parents were loaded up with rucksacks containing emergency clothing and a small survival kit, food and water to last us should we get hideously lost and need to camp out. Good grief! Surely that should have told us what we were in for but no, off we went like innocent lambs to the slaughter.

There is a moment in my latest novel, Blaming the Child, when Callister is forced to tramp off track through deep bush. She is scratched by the hooky thorns of bush lawyer and constantly tripped up by supplejack, spending most of the time on her hands and knees. That was me! I have truly never felt so helpless. For as far as I could see in every direction, it all looked the same. I could see how easy it was to get lost. Over five awful hours, I learned to navigate using a compass and also saw how simple it could be to trust your own judgement about where you were headed and topple off a ridge or into a water course. I got to use the radio and call in our coordinates, feeling a total fool when I got the lingo wrong and had to be straightened out by a teenager. It was both humbling and humiliating.

The second year, I had the privilege to be led on a tramp by my own daughter. She had suffered a dreadful head injury at the end of the previous year, being caught in a rock fall and received a bravery award. Miles from help, her head had been kept from falling apart using a handkerchief and a bright orange Search and Rescue baseball cap for an incredible twenty four hours. Then she walked 6km carrying her own pack, to civilisation, a horrified mother and hospital. She recovered and apart from the scar on her forehead and a wariness of scree slopes, she lost none of her passion for the bush and rescuing other people from its clutches.

Unfortunately by the end of our master class, my beautiful daughter declared me to be a ‘liability.’ I have a tendency to wander off after butterflies and pretty plants and she spent half an hour searching for me and the other parent whom I had inadvertently led astray. I have no idea how we ended up on the other side of that stream as neither of us adults remembered crossing it. I also disgraced myself by eating particularly poorly. While everyone else unwrapped hearty sandwiches and sensible energy bars, I created a stir by whipping out a tin of English mushy peas which I had lumped around in my rucksack. Having produced a tin opener and a dessert spoon, I horrified my poor daughter by eating the little green darlings cold, washed out the tin in the stream and carried it back to the scout hut, clanking loudly all the way.

Needless to say in her third year, she didn’t press me to attend with quite the same degree of excitement.

My character, Callister Rhodes, is a lot like me. She is surrounded by beauty but would rather not be. The New Zealand bush is both fascinating and terrifying and she doesn’t cope well with its isolation. It makes her feel powerless and causes her to question her own significance against the benchmark of its magnificence. If it weren’t for the competence of her companion, Declan Harris, she would not have survived.

Declan is like many of the young men and women whom I encountered on those weekends. He is infinitely capable and very much at home in his surroundings. Unlike Calli, he would be perfectly happy to live indefinitely in the bush. He has been well trained by a bush loving father, who taught him everything he knew, before dying prematurely.

I have been careful not to over-egg the pudding. My characters could have hunted for their food, surviving on rabbit or eel, but I wanted it to be realistic. It wouldn’t matter how hungry I got, I would never be able to stomach a slime covered eel, no matter how well you washed it and my daughter informed me knowledgeably, that rabbits would not be found on the upper slopes of the mountain, only in the lower farmland areas. Declan provides food for Calli, made up of dehydrated mince and powdered mashed potato. I may be criticised for this but can assure you, that my daughter and her companions survived happily on such ingredients for each of her weekends and the ten day trips which they did every New Year. I should know. I was in charge of firing up the dehydrator and the smell of it running overnight was pretty disgusting. But she required enough meals to last for ten days and that was my contribution. There is almost nothing that can’t be dehydrated and some things are more successful than others. Tinned fruit mushed up and spread over the shelves of the dehydrator comes out like fruit bar - bet you didn’t know that!

Above all, I truly hope that my novel has realism. The last thing I want is someone to slam the book down and declare that the author has clearly never experienced the bush. I want you, the reader to know that I have, I did and I really don’t want to again.  

Wanted - Serial Joiners, Dead or Alive.

I’m not really a serial ‘joiner’ to be honest. I tend to be the person that pulls a face at wedding invitations and ends up going out in the cold to the mall on a Saturday night, just to disprove the lie I told about being too busy to go to the birthday party. The lengths I’ve gone to in order to spend my life getting out of things, makes me wonder if sometimes, it would have been easier to show up for a few hours, drop off the obligatory present and then leave when decently acceptable.

So what changed when I started publishing my work? 

I decided to write a list of ten reasons why I joined all the myriad sites I seem to be a silent member of, in the hope of preventing someone else from going ever so slightly insane spending their life typing...without producing a single chapter of their novel. 

1.  Well, for starters, it’s a pretty isolating experience. You write by yourself, figuratively even if you can’t manage it literally. Yes the children were climbing the curtains, but you were happily ensconced in a fantasy world or stuck in a hotel with a pair of love birds. You saw what your offspring were doing, but only stopped typing when you heard the ripping sounds and were forced to grumpily tear yourself away from the keyboard. If you weren’t a loner before you started writing, you soon will be. I’ve agreed to all sorts of stupid, random things, just to get a bit of peace and quiet to finish a chapter or two. Writing makes you lousy company. You join sites, pages and groups to find kindred spirits.

2.  We are told as authors that social media is our friend. 
Who told us this? Well, people on social media of course. So we grab as many sites as we can, setting up pages for this and blogs for that. Then we fail to remember what we actually signed up to and definitely didn’t anticipate the hours of work that maintaining the monster would take. It eats at our writing time like a page eating dinosaur and ensures that the kids get beans on toast for their tea for the fourth night running. That’s ok. They haven’t bathed for a week so you don’t recognise them anyway.

3.  Our own sense of creative inferiority means that we have to obtain everything that other authors have. If they have an account with a book site and claim to have made a sale through it; we have to join. We forgot to put it in our favourites, cringed at the number of immediate messages asking us to join this or that forum on the site and two weeks later will try to join it again, bemused when the site tells us that it recognises our email address and would we please enter a password - which we now can’t remember.

4.  We want sales obviously, but what we also need is the lifeblood of authorship - reviews. Anything that promises ‘honest reviews’, we will join. We set off after them in the spirit of Indiana Jones searching for the Holy Grail and return battered and broken having acquired none - or none that we ever want to read again anyway.

5.  Like the silly children who skipped gaily after the Pied Piper, we follow other authors into hell and back, because we once struck up a conversation with them online and assumed that they knew what they were doing. We end up in forums where we and our work are horrifically tortured by ghouls who lurk in the shadows waiting for suckers like us to just show up, with our wide eyed innocence and pretty copies of our nice book to give away for free. What's your problem, you joined it, didn't you?

6.  Joining becomes as addictive as checking our sales on the KDP reports page. It’s like we actually believe that the more we check, the likelier it is that someone will have hopped on and made a purchase in the last two minutes while you were stirring the baked beans. If we are online and ever present, that same anonymous someone will see us, like us and buy something, especially if we put our best foot forward and smile, smile, smile. Hunt them down and join where they're joined.

7.  A hint of the dollar sign and we’re there, like flies around a cow pat, jockeying and jostling to be first to join, even though there is no such thing as a free lunch and any offer that is too good to be true, probably is a big fat con. We might have to part with a little something up front and we agonise and worry, but hand the money over anyway, justifying it to ourselves as we raid the biscuit tin where we were saving up for school shoes. It will be ok, our books will pay us back. Won’t they?

8.  Instead of giving ourselves a break and enjoying flexing our creative muscles, we put ourselves under pressure, berating our partners for the lovely meal they took us out for to soothe our frazzled nerves - because we weren’t online for a whole two hours (if you don’t count taking your phone to the toilet for a quick peek at Facebook.) It’s not just that we haven’t joined anything in two days, we’ve actually run out of things to join. We’re everywhere, like a bad smell, waving our book and shrieking, ‘Buy this, buy mine...please...anybody?’

9.  We suddenly discover that we are ‘all joined out’. The task is too massive for a single human being. We physically can’t do all the unrealistic tasks we have set ourselves. We can’t fulfil our obligations to post, tweet, blog, comment and message. There just aren’t enough hours in a day, even if we don’t change out of our pyjamas and get a shower. We join a different site and automate it, thinking that we’ve found the solution. But then we have to monitor the autobots, who email us just as regularly as all the other sites we joined earlier, telling us who followed and unfollowed us and giving us something else to worry about.

10.  After a miserable bout of self-doubt, during which time, we realised that we hadn’t written a single chapter all week, we go back to the keyboard and try and undo the damage. We spend hours trying to remember what we joined so that we can un-join ourselves, tying our brains up in knots as we reset thirty different passwords in one sitting and try and sort out the mess. As we fall into bed feeling marginally satisfied, we just allow ourselves one little peek at our sales reports and hey, what the heck, we sold a book...on Thursday. Oh crap, I think to myself. I bet they saw it on that site with the funny logo. I should probably rejoin...

Bring Back The Emotional Rollercoaster

I’ve read some incredible books recently. I’m currently reading Threads by Tom Tinney - it’s completely out of my genre and my comfort zone, but I’m hooked by his characterisation of many of those he’s drawn into his intrigue. No, I don’t usually ‘do’ aliens, or space for that matter, but I’m utterly hooked by the marshals in his novel. They are believable, totally plausible and I want to be there when they win through.

I’ve also read some shockers in my time. By that, I mean that I’ve got to the end of a novel having been sped through exciting fight scenes, scintillating dialogue and amazing mysteries that I couldn’t have thought up. I know who killed who and why, where they live and what they ate. I know what kind of music the main characters listen to, but possibly don’t actually recognise any of the bands that they slow danced or drove to. I know that they had some kind of health need because they took a pill which I cannot name, but then worse, far worse, I don’t know what they look like or what actually makes them tick on the inside.

We only have to look around us to find a smorgasbord of human emotion. It’s everywhere. Literally. It doesn’t matter where you work, there is bound to be someone loud, someone strangely quiet, someone with emotional problems, someone who drinks too much. Marriages break up every day. Add that to your own experience of grief and you have a veritable emotional soup. I’ve read some novels with awesome storylines, where the appointed heroine watches the love of her life walk away or draw their last breath and shrugs, picking up the strands of her life and trotting off in the other direction. What’s with that? Within two chapters, she’s snagged herself a more suitable replacement and on we go. In ‘About Hana’, I allowed eight years to have elapsed before my character could even consider the possibility of remarriage. Sometimes in life it does honestly happen sooner, but come on! Two chapters?

There is an insincerity which creeps into some novels. They begin well and I can’t work out whether there’s a lack of skill in the actual writing, or if some overzealous editor has gone through and removed all the character-related information in favour of fast paced action. The trouble is, it breeds an immaturity in the characterisation and as a reader, I find myself unable to anticipate how the lead character feels about something. They become almost automated. I’ve seen on a lot of blogs, the principle of ‘show not tell’ and that is an awesome piece of writing skill. I try but don’t always make it I must confess and there’s a heap of popular authors out there who don’t do any better than me at it. But at least I know that when their character or mine, struggles to cope with abuse, loss of a partner, an argument with a child or family member, they are undoubtedly in pain. I can see it, feel it and empathise with them in their hour of need. That’s what keeps me in a novel.

I watch a lot of action movies with my husband because that’s the genre he loves. But there’s been so many occasions when a sex scene has suddenly appeared slap (dare I say ‘bang’?) in the middle of a series of adrenaline fueled moments. I find myself thinking, ‘What the heck?’ when they strip off and get down to it. It’s almost as though the movie makers debated behind the scenes and one of them said knowledgeably, “Go on, put one in, we better had.” It has no bearing on the plot or the characterisation, it’s almost just paying lip service to the supposed audience for the sake of it. Because obviously we all expect that - not!

Yet some writers do that all the time. Picture the sequence, a car chase followed by a shooting, followed closely by a man hanging from a building by his fingernails, sex scene, woman wiping a tear away and on we go, car chase, stabbing, possible alien landing... And there I am, poking around on my Kindle trying desperately to work out who is who, what on earth they’re up to and how I’m meant to view this.

Relationship and character drawing has of late, been referred to mistakenly as ‘back story’ and yet the two things are very different. If your novel contains the finer points of atom separation and you feel the need to explain it in glorious, enthusiastic technicolour, then please warn me in the blurb and I just won’t buy it. I don’t have a scientific bone in my body and try as I might, I am not going to understand. I would consider that kind of description 'back story' or at the very least unnecessary technical yawn.

I wonder how we would feel in a soap opera that we love, if after the credits, the cameras rushed across our view with people going about their daily business, going to work, bathing their kids, making the tea, but never delved into the people’s actual lives. The wife is upset with the husband long working hours and thumps the tea down on the table. We glimpse the trail of a tear on her cheek. It’s not the meal she’s making that’s important, but the emotional stuff around it. Guys don’t generally like my books because there’s heaps of description and lots of ‘feelings’. That’s fine. I write for women anyway, but have begun to consider putting a warning on my novels, saying ‘NOT FOR MEN’.

In Du Rose Legacy, there’s a pregnancy, which means that at some point, a baby is going to have to come out. I wrote those scenes from experience. They were an emotional roller coaster of excitement, fear and relief, often all in the same minute, an uncontrolled lurching from one to the other, all borrowed from my own life. 

The New Du Rose Matriarch begins with a new mother failing to cope, running all kinds of stupid, unrealistic scenarios through her head, battered by exhaustion and feelings of guilt and failure. Readers have emailed me to tell me that they cried all the way through both of those scenes. They had been there and they understood. It touched something deep inside, something raw and painful but at the same time, reminded them that they had survived.

Perhaps I’m too emotional, too descriptive and verbose, a reader will always be the judge of that. I could have simply written, Hana wasn’t coping with her crying baby... and moved on to some more interesting plot moment, like when she finds a killer waiting for her by her car, or gets snatched. But if I did that, why on earth would the reader care? You care about Hana because you’ve grown to love her, with her red hair and her frustrating thought processes which make you want to kill her yourself, preferably after you’ve taken her out for coffee and tried to explain some salient facts to her.

Emotion isn’t back story, but it’s being confused with it. I’m tired of reading these two dimensional stories with lots of action and no substance. I never used to stop reading a novel, not for anything. I’ve struggled through some real doozies in my time. But lately, I’ve decided that I’m the wrong side of forty to be wasting valuable hours in a dead loss. So I am being more picky and less committed and I don’t think I’m alone. If an author isn’t willing to invest in their own character enough to let me, the reader, know how they feel about their circumstances or describe what they even look like, how can they expect me to battle on through to the end with them? It becomes a one-way partnership and I’m doing all the work.

My favourite novel of all time is MM Kaye's, ‘The Far Pavilions’ and has been for over twenty years. I’ve read it numerous times. It’s a massive piece of work and even in teeny-tiny print, you couldn’t fit the thing in your handbag. It’s easily bigger than a house brick. You could probably brain someone with it actually, only you wouldn’t be able to stop reading it long enough. It’s a colourful parade of the most in depth writing imaginable. The characters become like friends and you care about them enough to stay up late reading, in the hope that their circumstances will improve before you have to get up for work. It’s a detailed emotional roller coaster and I love every single page of it. Nowadays, I get the sense that it would be called ‘too wordy’, ‘not enough action’, ‘a bit too detailed’, ‘let’s cut the emotional stuff and throw the sister on the funeral pyre so that she can get on with committing suttee’. 

As authors, we’re competing in a world where nobody waits for anything. Every need can be fulfilled by a phone call, the push of a button or a sharply issued demand. Our heads are bursting with our own mess, so why on earth would we want to climb into someone else’s head and see how they cope with life?

The answer is: because we can.

I want to. Do you want to?

I want more than just to hang from the wing mirrors of a speeding car feeling disconcerted and afraid. I want to plumb depths that my own life either has, or will never take me into. Above all, I want to escape and I will ultimately do that by making friends and walking a mile in their shoes. 

So help me out here. What do your characters look like and what really makes them tick?

What? You actually want my opinion?

 

I’ve spent my whole life reading. I have memories of living in West Germany as a little girl, where my father was stationed with the Air Force and the library on the air base was better than a sweet shop for me. We had no TV and our entertainment was the British Forces Broadcasting Service radio programmes, Barbie dolls (dangerous with a little sister who had a penchant for snapping off arms, legs and occasionally heads) and books.

Books were expensive even back in the 1970’s and the likelihood of getting something written in English where the national language was German, was remote. But the library on the base had them all lined up neatly on shelves, Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, my heroes, wearing dustcovers and little plastic jackets to protect them from our tiny, eager hands. We went there on a Sunday after church but we had to be quick as the lunch would already be in the oven - my organised parents put it there before we left. There was no time to do proper choosing, it was just smash and grab, child style. It was the highlight of the week for me and sadly not always guaranteed. If Dad was on nights or working Sundays, we didn’t get to go anywhere as Mum couldn’t drive.

 

I remember once, getting home, scoffing my lunch and devouring Enid Blyton’s ‘Castle of Adventure’ for pudding. I couldn’t get enough of it. My mother refused to believe that I had actually read it all in that short space of time, coming upon me as I closed the back cover in sadness about two hours after lunch. I recounted the whole thing and she was probably sorry that she had asked, when I finally finished following her around the house four hours later.

 

But what is my point here?   
 

Well it’s basically that back then, nobody really cared if I liked the book and went back for the next one at the earliest opportunity. The publisher didn’t, the library just had it there and the author would never have known that she just make a little girl’s boring Sunday afternoon a whole lot better.

 

 

I started publishing a year ago, but only got my Kindle six months later as a gift from my mother. Up until then, I was still feeding my library habit, only I could choose six instead of one and didn’t have to pay my younger sister in household chores just to let me have her choose as well. Again, the library didn’t care if I liked my picks when I returned them, they probably measured their stats on how many times that book was issued, but they never actually asked ME personally if I had enjoyed it.

I always read the bit about the author in the back and love it when there’s a photo because I can see if they look how I imagined them. Maybe there were email addresses and website addresses but I had a book in my hands, not a computer and so I don’t recall ever looking anything up.

 

The world is different now. When I finish a book on my Kindle, a box pops up asking me if I want to give it a star rating. Amazon emails me if I ignore that and asks me what I thought of my purchase. As a reader, I’m bombarded by questions and asked for my opinion about somebody else’s work. It’s no longer that detached experience, it’s an interaction with a real person, who is going to see what I think and have an opinion on it. As a reader, I’m not sure how I feel about that. I like what I like and surely that’s nobody’s business but mine. Isn’t it?

As an author, I am ranked and rated and statistically examined a million times over, based on the reviews I get for my work. Some authors give away copies of their precious works in return for reviews which they may never get, knowing that the greasy pole which our books have to climb is aided by the solid opinion of our readers. Others cajole, encourage and resort to begging readers who perhaps agree cagily and then don’t, for a whole variety of reasons.

What seems to have happened in the last few years, is that readers who willingly and genuinely place reviews for every book they read, become hot property. Amazon and Goodreads both have lists of their ‘top 100 reviewers’. I do routinely review almost every book that I read nowadays, because I know that it’s important and even I have a rank as a reviewer - not a very good one yet, but it’s getting there. Authors used to be powerful people, able to influence the fabric of society, the perception of governments and the mood of the people. Now it’s readers.

With the click of the keyboard, a reader can place a review that either devastates or delivers hope to somebody who has put their work out there in the ether. There are no surprises (other than perhaps content) as the author will be eagerly awaiting that opinion. Some authors must check hourly for reviews. I’ve put up a review as a reader, only to get a notification from Amazon within minutes that ‘somebody’ liked my review and found it ‘helpful’. I know it’s the author, who else could it be? I’m going to time the next one and see how long it takes. I might even keep a book on it, in a light hearted, completely non-financially advantageous way, you understand.

A few reviewers really do understand the power of reviews. I have heard awful stories of reviewers deliberately trashing work which they haven’t even read, just because they can. They spend an afternoon dolling out one star reviews to random authors because it’s raining and they were bored. But I wonder if they get and keep that power, because not enough of the other readers out there, know that their opinion is wanted and valued, very much. Perhaps if the load was spread among the other millions, the corrosive influence of the few would be dispersed.

I’m not really sure what the answer is - I’m just musing as always.

I guess what I’m saying is that, if you are reading this and currently enjoying something on your iPad, Kindle or other device, just know that there is an author on the other side of that creation who is desperate to know what you thought. Yes you! They care about how your received their main character, what you liked or didn’t about the setting. Are you bothered that they killed off the lead actress at the end or did you hate her anyway? Did you want to marry the leading man or take out a hit on him and more importantly, when this author puts out their next book, will you be there? Do a 5 minute review. Let them know.



 

Reviews - What Goes Around, Comes Around


I’ve seen some really spiteful reviews out there in the ether, needlessly unkind words that have absolutely no relation to the work which some reviewers claim to have read, and hated. Until I began publishing, I had no idea that I was even meant to write reviews for the books I read - I guess it never occurred to me that anyone else would be interested in my opinion and perhaps that’s part of the problem. Nobody was - and now they are. In fact, an author will go to great lengths to get that reviewer’s precious opinion, in the dreadful numbers game that pushes publications further up the food chain because of the number of verified reviews.

Gutenberg Bible courtesy of Creative Commons
Wikimedia uploaded by Gun Powder Ma

Until a couple of years ago, I was happily getting books out of my local library and reading them, before just as happily returning them. The lady behind the counter would take them and put them back into the system, not even remotely interested in whether they had met my expectation or if I had failed to get beyond the first chapter. I wasn’t awfully inclined to hand them over with, ‘Thanks, that was really great, I read it in the bath,’ or, ‘I didn’t like all the expletives in that one’ (opens page to make point) ‘I don’t suppose you know what that swear word actually means...?’ She wasn’t interested in the minutiae of my reading experience, what I thought of the cover or blurb and she definitely wasn’t passing on any of my inane observations to the author.

Now we live in an age where the author is not just someone remote; that photographed gentle looking soul on the back page who wrote the book in your hand, but with whom you can have no meaningful interaction. They are accessible, their email address and website is in the back of their work, you can get in touch, compliment or abuse them and walk away largely unscathed. You can follow and un-follow them, like and unlike them, scour their lives and find out personal things about them. It’s all out there and in their eagerness to engage you, the reader, they handed it all to you on a plate in short bios, comments on Facebook, posts on Google+ and throw away comments on Twitter. You can have an opinion on what they wear, where they go and who they go with, in addition to that all important critique of their latest piece of work. You can extol or rubbish it as you so desire, depending on what mood you’re in or how much you enjoyed the thing they pulled out of their head for your pleasure alone.

Old book bindings at the Merton College Library
Picture courtesy of CC Licence Tom Murphy VII

Just scrolling down random reviews on Amazon, I can tell you now that there are some horrible things written about novels which were published with the best of intentions by good people full of hope. Things like, “Hated it. What a load of rubbish...” “Just couldn’t finish it...” “He’s mad if he thinks that’s literature...” and yes, maybe good money was spent on something that wasn’t really print ready and the author needs a bit of a kick into reality, but surely there are nicer ways to do it? I have to balance the thing out to be fair, as I also saw some really helpful comments too, “An awesome storyline but the book needs a really good editor...” “Some parts of this novel weren’t very realistic and it lost its believability for me when...”

Good on you, those awesome people who put up a review at all and bravo to those readers who, instead of ranting about their wasted 99c, actually gave some helpful pointers to the author. We’re so full of our own sense of ‘me’ as a society, that it’s suddenly become ok to say, ‘I hated that book,’ but not why. If you take something back to a shop, you give a reason if you’re expecting your money back, ‘It didn’t fit me, it didn’t look right on, it made my butt look like HMS Interloper.’ You wouldn’t get away with saying to a shop assistant, ‘I hate it. It sucks.’ If you’re unfortunate enough to get caught in the crossfire of someone else’s family dispute, they’re really quick to tell you why they don’t like that particular family member. Believe me, they can go on for hours. Anyone who’s ever watched Jeremy Kyle or in the olden days, Jerry Springer, try and mediate between two raging forces who can’t even remember how it all started, knows all about the ‘why’s’ of arguments. If you get a horrid cup of coffee and paid NZ$4 for the pleasure and have the courage to take it back to the barrista, rather than sneaking out and leaving it on the table, you can’t just say, ‘I hated that coffee,’ because they’re bound to ask you what in particular was wrong with it. So how come it’s alright to tell someone that their book sucked, in public, on the internet for all future customers to see for time immemorial, but not tell them honestly why?

I had a bad review recently and it actually rocked my confidence initially. A book that had been getting only 5* reviews from perfect strangers suddenly had this 3* thrown at it and why? Well, I honestly couldn’t tell you. There was nothing coherent about the review that gave me a clue, other than that the person just didn’t like it. That’s ok but it would have been helpful to know what in particular they didn’t like. They raved on about nonsense really, not getting parts of the plot which, when I checked again were clearly explained and accounted for and they even used the wrong name for one of the characters and misunderstood the location of the whole book. So whilst they had admittedly damaged my poor book’s stats without just cause, I had to dismiss the review as the strange ramblings of someone I would probably rather didn’t ever buy any of my novels again.

Some reviews are so downright unhelpful, it makes me wonder about the kind of people who bother to place their fingers over the keyboard and type. One novel I bought recently was ruined for me because the reviewer decided to blatantly reveal the ending. (Note to self - never read reviews when you’re half way through.) I mean, why would you do that, destroy the ending for everyone else just because you thought it was rubbish? And some of them are so littered with grammatical and spelling errors, I wonder if they are even qualified to be commenting on the quality of somebody else’s work.  

I think the moral of the story is to do what our parents told us when we were kids:

Think before you speak...only in this case, it’s think before you type.

Some salient questions before pressing ‘submit’ for that mean review:

1. Am I being deliberately personal?

2. Did I give this novel a fair go?

3. Have I been reasonable in my criticism and offered examples to back it up?

4. Have I listed at least one thing that the author got right?

5. Would I stand in front of this author and be prepared to read my review out  
    loud to them, when I can see their reaction?

If you can’t think of even one nice thing to say, then perhaps you aren’t reviewing with the right heart, but are just needlessly assassinating another person’s work for the sheer fun of it. In which case, don’t expect to be taken seriously and if you are an author trashing another author’s work, don’t be surprised when what goes around, comes right back to bite you.