goodreads
Potato
A Farmer
Becca L.
20 Reviews 437 Followers
★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
I got this potato expecting it to be more of an apple. It was not red or yellow or green and wasn’t sweet at all. Instead, it was brown and had rough skin and I was supposed to cook it. I’m not a fan of potatoes. DNF.
If I read one more “This is not the kind of book I like to read. One star” Or “I was expecting this book to be a different thing, so therefore it sucks” review I stg
The one star reviews of children's books on Amazon are pretty hilarious. My favorite is one that accuses Goodnight Moon of promoting atheism bc "goodnight nobody"
Okay but actually if you find the Goodreads pages of certain children's books, some of them have their rankings just tanked because teachers make "read and review a book" a school project and there are just like dozens of 1 and 2 star ratings and reviews from actual schoolchildren XD
I read a lot of great books in school but fuck A Separate Peace.
And I say that as someone who went to boarding school and was deeply closeted at the time. I’m the target audience!
We studied that book for like a whole semester and not one time did anyone mention a whiff of gayness. This would’ve been around 1996, so not too surprising, but I don’t really understand what they expected us to get out of the book without that key element
A Separate Peace is the one book from school for which I have an abiding grudge. Honestly can't even remember exactly what I hated about the writing, but the memory of seething anger with the text remains strong decades later.
It is honestly so funny to read them. "This book is the worst thing I've ever read and I hate my teacher for making me read it" is just amazing to read XD It's just hilarious
There are also those books like The Great Gilly Hopkins and Bridge to Terabithia (damn you, Katherine Paterson!) where you’re a sobbing puddle of snot and tears at the end and you punch that one star just out of anger for making you feel the feels even though they’re great books
My personal favorite is kind of the flip side of this—namely, people who give effusive reviews to random products that they use for their own singular, bizarre purpose. Like the plastic dinosaurs that someone had sawed in half, spray painted gold, & installed as drawer pulls. Five stars! 😂
Even better, if you read the whole thing (which included photos bc I assume they realized how cheated we’d all feel if it didn’t), the reviewer DOES give broadly useful info like “very firm, easy to glue on” but wastes zero time trying to explain their choices or motivations. No gods! No masters!
goodnight void
goodnight vacua
goodnight absence
goodnight lacuna
goodnight lack and goodnight want
goodnight to the old lady whispering "omnes vulnerant"
"the author, frustratingly and incomprehensibly, did not write the book which i wanted to read and this vexes me"
*author writes exactly what the reviewer wants*
"the events in this book were very predictable and as a result very unexciting"
This has long been a troubling issue in criticism across forms. When I was overseeing the editorial department of a music streaming service, we had to devise an entire approach to combat it:
I'm glad no one told the late, great Neil Kulkarni he had to tread on eggshells when writing about the bad stuff. If something needed a kicking, he gave it one. thequietus.com/articles/088...
Sure, but note how he doesn't JUST say, "I don't like them," nor does he ridicule people who might disagree. He very colorfully explains why he personally finds them abysmal hypocrites, and deftly describes the huge gap between what they attempt and what they achieve. Nothing I wrote says that's bad
True, or if it isn’t something you would expect or are used to getting from a creator with a reputation for a certain style of work, or something in a certain genre. You might have to meet that creation by its own terms. It might be a “grower”, or something that no one else has ever done before.
I wish I could remember who said that the key to reviewing was "did the work achieve what it set out to do?" That is a question a reviewer can answer whatever their personal biases are.
This is what largely turned me off the whole 'snark reviews' genre. It so often turns into people who were never the intended audience for something humorously misrepresenting it for other people who are also not the intended audience. It stops being funny once you've seen the pattern repeatedly.
One of the only things Roger Ebert said about art that I agreed with, is you have to ask yourself: What is this piece of media trying to do, and how well does it accomplish that goal?
One of the best pieces of critique advice I ever heard.
And it may simply just be a very, very good example, maybe even the ultimate example, of something that’s just not up your alley personally
But I would love to think, ideally, maybe naively, that most people in most cases would pay money for a work of art and know exactly what they are getting into
