Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Just Don't Go Out So Much
Kelly Herold's blog led me to this piece by Meg Rosoff about why she doesn't like to write negative reviews. I have to say that I don't find writers to be the best reviewers, because they tend to be too sympathetic and too focused on being "encouraging," as if the author were the primary audience for the review rather than the potential reader. There is also a tendency in the allied children's book fields to be "nice," which isn't good for literature and can also unfortunately short-circuit when the strain of being friendly and polite all of the time becomes too much and what might have been simply a quiet demur instead gets ugly. But Rosoff's example of a reviewer feeling bad after meeting the author of the object of her scorn is just plain chicken. Far more than in adult literature, there's a lot of contact between children's book authors and their reading communities, which I think leads to a lot of soft-pedaling--I've had reviewers turn down assignments of mediocre books by authors they will be having dinner with, and I remember a fellow member of a book prize jury deflecting criticism of a particular book because the author, the previous evening, had explained to the member --while they were dancing--why the book was the way it was. The author-reviewer relationship is unavoidably adversarial: one is judging the other. To have it otherwise means we should just all go work in publicity.