The Sticky Review
Here's a question I've been asking in person, where I can see the answerer and where I tend to get a blunter answer. Only the answers I keep getting have so many other hands on it, it's pretty much got universal tentacles
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But when I do -- hm. I think the thing that makes me note down a title is when the review catches my interest somehow, piques my curiosity. This would be an interview about Lewis's "truth breathed through silver," about liminal spaces, about real life and what we take into fiction, did that for me, and now I'm curious about it. I picked up Operation Mincemeat because it seemed a tale so ridiculously intricate that I could hardly believe it was true (and I put it down again because forty pages in, there were upwards of half a dozen white middle-aged men, and I'd already lost track of which was which before anything had even started happening . . . and, well, the review had summarized the plot pretty well, anyway). I picked up Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things because there's a certain tendency towards hoarding in my family, and it's a topic I'm curious about. I tracked down a copy of one of the novels you wrote collaboratively after reading your post about writing collaboratively (and I haven't gotten around to reading it yet, but I will, one of these days. After I finish the book about female SOE agents that's due in less than two weeks).
Perhaps that's another way of saying "The thing that makes this book unique/interesting/whatever." It's usually not a plot summary, or even terribly spoilery, although a witty encapsulation of the general theme/plot arc of the book in one or two sentences might do it. More frequently, I think it's the setting, or the novum, or the description of a character (combined with some sort of guarantee that the book is well-written and acceptably not annoying in other respects).
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