The Facts in Reviews

[_ocelott_]

Publishers Weekly recently reviewed Courtney Milan's upcoming release, Unveiled, in which the reviewer enjoyed the writing but said the premise of the historical romance rang false. The implausibility ruined the book for the reviewer.

Courtney Milan wrote a detailed blog post discussing her research and how the premise of her novel was uncommon

Comments

[elizawrites]

Full disclosure: I know Courtney and find it laughable to think that anyone would imply that she didn't know what she was doing when it came to matters of historical law. She knows her stuff.

That said, are you kidding me? I am not impugning historicals -- they're probably my favorite genre and I read a LOT of them. And there's so much crazy legal tomfoolery going on in so many of them it's ridiculous. I just have no idea when "not legally plausible" became a reason to give a historical a bad to middling review.

[christina_reads]

I think that if a reviewer sees something in a book that seems inaccurate, he should feel free to mention it, but maybe with some sort of disclaimer ("I don't have a background in this historical period, but X seemed implausible to me"). If an author then wants to defend himself, that's fine too, as long as both sides keep it civil.

I also think it's OK to give a bad review to a book with historical inaccuracies in it. If you notice the inaccuracies, it means that the book didn't do a good job of drawing you into its world; and if the setting isn't believable to you, I can understand why you wouldn't enjoy the book!

[editormum]

While it is lovely to see author and reviewer behaving maturely over this, I actually disagree with the retraction. If it feels implausible to the reader, then that's their reaction and it's a valid one. It doesn't mean it's a bad book, it just means that as the reader, I didn't believe in the premise. Whether that's because my knowledge was not as comprehensive as the extensively researched author's (and let's be honest, 99% of people aren't going to have that same knowledge if the author has used an uncommon premise, however historically accurate), or because the author didn't make it FEEL believable, doesn't matter - fact is, that's the reaction the reader had.

I have strong feelings about this because I've had authors write full page responses to edits I've suggested in their work, explaining why they want it to be like this, and I'm like, dude, sure, you can give ME a full page explanation about that one word that completely knocked me out of the story, but you can't do that to your reader...