A Bad Review of My Book Made Me Laugh

I dreamed of being a writer from about second grade on, when I wrote my first short story. It was really short, about three or four paragraphs that crept in laborious, painstaking print across the page. That little epic is now in The Lev Raphael Papers at Michigan State University for future scholars of my work to glean infinite meaning from, or just say, "Oh, cute!" and move on.

Whenever I imagined the writing life, I didn't expect my work would ever be purchased by any university's Special Archives, and I certainly didn't expect a sea of glowing reviews. I learned early on from author biographies and even from newspapers -- since I was an avid reader of The New York Times -- that reviews could be harsh.

Over the years, some writers I know actually take vacations to avoid hearing about their reviews, or they turn off their phones and avoid the Internet entirely. Me, I stay home but have my reviews vetted by my spouse: If there's something in them I need to read or might want to read, the review gets passed along or I hear an excerpt. Occasionally this system breaks down when a friend or acquaintance lets me know about something egregious they found in a review. Like the Publishers Weekly reviewer who didn't even know how many mysteries I'd published in my Nick Hoffman series; checking my web site might have been helpful.

One Booklist reviewer obviously hadn't read my novel The German Money carefully because she claimed I dealt with a theme that wasn't even in the book. That was frustrating. But my suspense novel Assault With a Deadly Lie got a wrong-headed review from Kirkus Reviews that actually made me laugh.

For those who aren’t aware, in the publishing world Kirkus has been known by editors, publicists, agents and authors as notorious for its often gratuitously bitchy reviews. And if that sounds hard to believe, one of their editors freely admitted the more-than-occasional nasty tone when we were at a conference. Kirkus can feel like the belligerent alcoholic relative you know is likely to show up at family reunions and spoil the day by getting drunk, starting a fight, and puking into the potato salad.

So what cracked me up about this review of my 25th book? To make a point that completely defies the plot and logic of Assault With a Deadly Lie, the anonymous reviewer said my novel contradicted the message of one of my co-authored books, a book about self-esteem for kids 8-12.

I am not kidding. This nimrod didn't compare my adult thriller to any other book in my Nick Hoffman mystery series, or to anyone else’s thrillers, but wholly inappropriately compared it to a children's self-help book. And the benighted reviewer reached a conclusion that was 100% at odds with what actually happens in the novel and what it means.

I’ve been a print, radio, and online reviewer myself for many years, but a sloppy and inept review like that is a perfect example of P.G. Wodehouse's definition of reviewers: "deaf men tuning a piano."