by Doug Lewars
Book reviews are a fact of life. If it’s your book being reviewed, they’re nice if they’re positive and decidedly unpleasant if they’re negative. Every book is going to have a few negative reviews. That’s a fact of life because people are different, have different interests, enjoy different things, and will relate to your work in different ways.
In addition, you will probably want to, or at least be expected to, review someone’s work and that can be tricky. Explaining to an author that his command of the language would make a pre-school child squirm with embarrassment is not likely to win you any friends; and he or she might take a run at your work purely from a spirit of tit-for-tat.