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Meredith Rankin's avatar

I like your honesty, Emma! I, too, struggle with saying something new or clever in book reviews. I used to do a lot of book reviews, actually, but I tend to be a little too critical and honest, then swing to the other extreme and give five stars to books that really don't merit it. It's mostly because I'm querying, and I don't want a bad review to come back to bite me; I also am VERY mindful of how much work goes into even a crappy novel. (It occurs to me that this could be a good substack post. LOL)

Anyway, one thing I figured out is that almost no one is saying anything original or clever in their reviews ... and that authors don't necessarily care, as long as they get a decent 4 or 5 star rating and have their number of reviews boosted (hence driving it up in Amazon's algorithms). Read enough reviews and they all start to sound similiar, to be honest. (Especially the one star reviews, which are often so similiar that I think they're written by the same person under different AMazon accounts, but that's a completely different topic!)

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