But I think that were I to allow myself to forget that so much of what we each consider good is subjective, it really would make me pretty insufferable, and I might be more closed minded when it came to seeing the strengths and weaknesses of each book. I hold onto my humility because it, too, serves an important purpose.

I agree completely. It’s one thing to believe, as I do, that there are objective standards out there (with differing interpretations, etc.) but another to think you know them all. Humility is not only an endearing and valuable moral attitude in and of itself, it’s likely to enhance your objective judgments.

But you’re right when you say that a review depends largely on the reviewer’s reading taste; there are some people who will just not like a book no matter how good it is. I know that I’ve read some supposedly ‘amazing’ books but couldn’t stand them. I think that everyone (even the most professional reviewer) can get like this at times. Though it is my firm belief that a good reviewer can provide a review that is not entirely opinion (meaing it is grounded in fact as strives to be somewhat objective)

Thanks so much for the great post!

What you jokingly refer to as possible arrogance, I see as your conviction that you have a pretty good idea of what is good in romantic fiction, and whether you are a reader or are a writer taking criticisms, you can separate the wheat from the chaff.

Yes, but I do this according to a set of criteria formed personal likes and dislikes that are at least somewhat subjective.

You are saying that in romance, but perhaps not in other genres, your subjective taste maps pretty well onto objective excellence. And that would no surprise me at all in your case.

You make me blush. But no, I think what I am saying is that it feels to me as though my subjective tastes map onto objective excellence. But how am I to know that that is actually the case? I think it would be arrogant to believe that.

Is that arrogant? Is it arrogant to think you know something about a genre you have been reading for years and are a writer and critique partner in? Not in my opinion. It’s just knowing what you know.

Oh, I know I know something about the genre. But that to me is not the same as thinking my preference for books is more than an informed, thought-out opinion.

And it’s not arrogant as long as you recognize all of the subjective elements that make the reader-author encounter so rich and fruitful, and so personal, which you clearly do.

But here I come to the crux of this issue… those subjective elements are such a strong part of the mix in reviewing that it’s not uncommon to have two equally qualified reviewers disagree strongly (We often do it with our dueling reviews at DA).

So yeah, there’s a part of me that feels strongly that I recognize the wheat from the chaff. And that part can be very useful in reviewing as well as in the writing process. But I think that were I to allow myself to forget that so much of what we each consider good is subjective, it really would make me pretty insufferable, and I might be more closed minded when it came to seeing the strengths and weaknesses of each book. I hold onto my humility because it, too, serves an important purpose.

I read your excellent post but really just skimmed the other comments (sorry, meaty discussion but I’m running out of free time today .

You’ve hit upon the true challenge for a reviewer. How to acknowledge your own triggers (I love the unintended pregnancies, I’m so embarrassed to admit) but still write an opinion that is of some worth in describing the book to someone else. How to balance and reveal your own subjective responses while still dealing with the objective strengths and weaknesses of the work. I haven’t seen it laid out quite so clearly anywhere else. Thanks.

I love to read romance, YA, and fantasy fiction and review books on my personal blog for fun. I personally find it difficult to write a purely objective book review on a fictional book. I try to be as objective as possible, but it’s almost impossible for me to remove my personal response to a story from my assessment of its quality. Obviously a book has to be written well as far as it’s structure, character and plot development, grammar, conflict resolution, et cetera, but after that, how much I enjoy a book is often personal preference.

In any case, I think a reviewer should always include an explanation of what they did or didn’t like about the book, so I at least can determine whether or not those reasons are enough to stop or encourage me to read the book for myself.

I recently reviewed a book on my blog that moved me so strongly because of personal experiences and I knew it would be impossible for me to be objective in a review. I wrote the review anyway but made sure that it was clear in the beginning of my post that I knew I couldn’t be completely objective. I figure someone could still get something out of my review regardless, so I went with it.

Again, very interesting topic, Jessica. Thanks for posting it!

I love the insight you provide into the writing process. And your first comment brings in the importance of a writer having her own voice, which is an angle I hadn’t thought of.

I think my comment about critique partners is compatible with all of your points. When you say you don’t take everyone’s advice, b/c you have to be true to your vision for the work, I would see that as you knowing that not all advice is good advice and that only good advice will make the work better.

The claim that there is objective value in literature is different form the claim that every book has to instantiate the same set of values to be good. Something may work for someone else’s book but not yours. Objectivity doesn’t mean one universal set of qualities or standards. Just like people can be good in all sorts of ways (one is generous, one is brave, one is kind) so can books. But those people are really, objectively, those things, just as the books are.

What you jokingly refer to as possible arrogance, I see as your conviction that you have a pretty good idea of what is good in romantic fiction, and whether you are a reader or are a writer taking criticisms, you can separate the wheat from the chaff. You are saying that in romance, but perhaps not in other genres, your subjective taste maps pretty well onto objective excellence. And that would no surprise me at all in your case.

Is that arrogant? Is it arrogant to think you know something about a genre you have been reading for years and are a writer and critique partner in? Not in my opinion. It’s just knowing what you know. And it’s not arrogant as long as you recognize all of the subjective elements that make the reader-author encounter so rich and fruitful, and so personal, which you clearly do.

Have you ever read a book and thought, “Hmm. I did not enjoy it at all, but I do agree that it is an excellent book.”

What do you make of the status of the claim “but it is an excellent book.”?

This is an embarrassing admission because it may point to some arrogance, but the only times what you are describing has ever happened to me were with books whose aims were to frighten or disturb or discomfit the reader. Books like J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbaraians or Golding’s Lord of the Flies. I found them very bleak, but I believe they were intended to be. I could not precisely enjoy them because they weren’t meant to be enjoyed, but I did recognize their quality.

But it has never happened to me with a romance, that I couldn’t enjoy it at all yet thought it an excellent book. I’ve had it happen, very recently, that I found a book beautifully crafted in terms of its language, but the characterization did not ring true to me, so I could not consider it a good book. I recognized that in many ways it was stronger than most books in the genre, but its weakenesses were glaring enough that I could not give it a favorable review, even though I understood why many other readers had loved it.

But that is not the same as what you are describing. With romances, because their aim is to be enjoyable, and because I am analytical, I am almost always able to analyze my own reactions and pinpoint why I don’t enjoy the ones I don’t enjoy. And when I pinpoint why the book did not work for me, I see that as a weakness, and therefore I can’t see the book as excellent.

For one thing, most authors have critique partners and editors. What do they take these people to be doing if not trying to make the writing better in some objective sense (not just “my editor/crit partner personally liked it more” or “it will sell better”)?

I can’t speak for other writers but for me, the process of having my writing critiqued is a very interesting exercise in trying to differentiate the criticism I agree with and can use from the criticism that I can’t use. I’ve taken a fair number of writing workshops and classes, so I’ve had my writing critiqued by many people, and what I find is that often the most helpful comments were those who came from people whose tastes and sensibilities were most similar to mine.

Those writers and beta readers were more likely to understand what I was going for, whereas there have also been writers whose goals for their own writing are so different from my goals for mine that they could not understand my aims and used their own aims as guidelines, which resulted in critiques that tried to steer my writing in a direction that was not where I wanted it to go.

Some writers will even say outright that they can’t evaluate a classmate’s writing because it’s in a genre they avoid since they don’t care for it.

When it comes to catching grammatical or spelling errors almost any well-read reader can be helpful, so there’s no such thing as a completely useless critique, but there are certainly critiques that have as many unhelpful comments as helpful ones.

And then there are the times when even the best of crit partners have a difference of opinion. I am incredibly fortunate in my crit partners Sherry Thomas and Meredith Duran. I think they are both extraordinarily talented writers and insightful critiquers, yet in their most recent critiques of my my current manuscript, there was a paragraph one of them loved and the other suggested I cut. Is one of them right and the other wrong? Or is it simply a matter of taste?

IMO even when it comes to critiqing, at least once a writer has some technical proficiency, it really comes down to subjective opinion. Yes, writers are trying to make their writing stronger and better when they ask for feedback on their manuscripts, but even then, what they are hoping for is that the end result will be better according to their own standards, not standards that conflict with theirs.

We can all improve as writers, yes, but that improvement process is intertwined with our own subjective tastes. When writers start trying to please everyone indiscriminately, the writing usually suffers.

To produce good writing, I have to set a high bar for myself, and for me that bar comes from a vision of what I hope that work will be. That vision is subjective, and it is based on having read books I have loved in the past, and chances are that people who don’t love those books won’t love what I produce, either. No writing is universally loved, and there is no universal agreement on what is great. So even when we try to improve, it is always along a subjective trajectory.

Thanks for your comment! I agree that there is an ineliminably subjective element of reviews, and I agree that things like spelling are probably the most objective features on a sliding scale, but I also think there are a lot more objective elements besides the few you mention.

Have you ever read a book and thought, “Hmm. I did not enjoy it at all, but I do agree that it is an excellent book.”

What do you make of the status of the claim “but it is an excellent book.”?

Yes, it’s true, that occasionally a reviewer can point out something that is objectively an error, like a misspelling or a grammatical error. Very, very rarely, you can find something even more major, like the continuity error I recently mentioned in a review (It was a scene in which characters who had already met in an earlier scene introduced themselves and said “Nice to meet you.”)

But those instances are rare, especially for me since these days I often review ARCs, and therefore can’t mention the spelling errors since the hope is that they will not be there in the final copy of the printed book. And even when they happen, they are often not the issues readers most care about or want to know about in a review. These instances don’t comprise the bulk of what I read in book reviews and so there simply aren’t enough of them to convince me that reviews are objective rather than subjective.

I think it’s entirely possible for two reviews of the same book to be informed, well-reasoned, and well-written and still disagree strongly about the book. That’s because different readers have different priorities for their criteria of what makes a book good.

Take for example myself and my friend and fellow Dear Author reviewer Jayne. I happen to know from conversations with Jayne is that one of the things she most enjoys is a romance with an unusual plot or setting. If a book doesn’t at least have one or hopefully both of these things, it is very likely to disappoint her.

As for me, while I enjoy a fresh plot and an unusual setting, the author’s use of language and the depth of the characterization are more important to my enjoyment of a book. Consequently I can even enjoy a book that has a setting which has been used many times and a plot that isn’t particularly unusual if the language feels fresh or better yet, lyrical, and if the characters feel fully fleshed and multidimensional.

A book could be set on the Galpagos island and have a plot full of unexpected twists and turns, but if the language itself feels cliched and the characters seem flat, I will feel like I’ve read it all before and will not make it past chapter two.

A book could have complicated, multidimensional characters and the writing could be sheer poetry, but if it’s set in Regency England and the setup is a very familiar one (say, pairing a bored and aimless rake with a virgin who becomes his mistress to save her family from starving), there’s a good chance Jayne wouldn’t be able to finish it.

It’s not that Jayne likes cliched writing or that I like cliched setups, it is just that the degree to which these things bother each of us is different, and therefore so are our priorities. There are times when I think a book is pure genius and Jayne thinks it’s meh, and vice-versa.

Who is right in these cases, Jayne or myself? The truth is that there is no objective right or wrong. Our reviews are reflections of our selves and our tastes. We are different people, so the grades we give to the same books are often different too.

Which is why, though I agree that not all reviews are created equal, I still see even the best ones as subjective.