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17 book review examples to help you write the perfect review.

It’s an exciting time to be a book reviewer. Once confined to print newspapers and journals, reviews now dot many corridors of the Internet — forever helping others discover their next great read. That said, every book reviewer will face a familiar panic: how can you do justice to a great book in just a thousand words?

As you know, the best way to learn how to do something is by immersing yourself in it. Luckily, the Internet (i.e. Goodreads and other review sites , in particular) has made book reviews more accessible than ever — which means that there are a lot of book reviews examples out there for you to view!

In this post, we compiled 17 prototypical book review examples in multiple genres to help you figure out how to write the perfect review . If you want to jump straight to the examples, you can skip the next section. Otherwise, let’s first check out what makes up a good review.

Are you interested in becoming a book reviewer? We recommend you check out Reedsy Discovery , where you can earn money for writing reviews — and are guaranteed people will read your reviews! To register as a book reviewer, sign up here.

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What must a book review contain?

Like all works of art, no two book reviews will be identical. But fear not: there are a few guidelines for any aspiring book reviewer to follow. Most book reviews, for instance, are less than 1,500 words long, with the sweet spot hitting somewhere around the 1,000-word mark. (However, this may vary depending on the platform on which you’re writing, as we’ll see later.)

In addition, all reviews share some universal elements, as shown in our book review templates . These include:

• A review will offer a concise plot summary of the book. 
• A book review will offer an evaluation of the work. 
• A book review will offer a recommendation for the audience. 

If these are the basic ingredients that make up a book review, it’s the tone and style with which the book reviewer writes that brings the extra panache. This will differ from platform to platform, of course. A book review on Goodreads, for instance, will be much more informal and personal than a book review on Kirkus Reviews, as it is catering to a different audience. However, at the end of the day, the goal of all book reviews is to give the audience the tools to determine whether or not they’d like to read the book themselves.

Keeping that in mind, let’s proceed to some book review examples to put all of this in action.

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Book review examples for fiction books

Since story is king in the world of fiction, it probably won’t come as any surprise to learn that a book review for a novel will concentrate on how well the story was told .

That said, book reviews in all genres follow the same basic formula that we discussed earlier. In these examples, you’ll be able to see how book reviewers on different platforms expertly intertwine the plot summary and their personal opinions of the book to produce a clear, informative, and concise review.

Note: Some of the book review examples run very long. If a book review is truncated in this post, we’ve indicated by including a […] at the end, but you can always read the entire review if you click on the link provided.

Examples of literary fiction book reviews

Kirkus Reviews reviews Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man :

An extremely powerful story of a young Southern Negro, from his late high school days through three years of college to his life in Harlem.

His early training prepared him for a life of humility before white men, but through injustices- large and small, he came to realize that he was an "invisible man". People saw in him only a reflection of their preconceived ideas of what he was, denied his individuality, and ultimately did not see him at all. This theme, which has implications far beyond the obvious racial parallel, is skillfully handled. The incidents of the story are wholly absorbing. The boy's dismissal from college because of an innocent mistake, his shocked reaction to the anonymity of the North and to Harlem, his nightmare experiences on a one-day job in a paint factory and in the hospital, his lightning success as the Harlem leader of a communistic organization known as the Brotherhood, his involvement in black versus white and black versus black clashes and his disillusion and understanding of his invisibility- all climax naturally in scenes of violence and riot, followed by a retreat which is both literal and figurative. Parts of this experience may have been told before, but never with such freshness, intensity and power.

This is Ellison's first novel, but he has complete control of his story and his style. Watch it.

Lyndsey reviews George Orwell’s 1984 on Goodreads:

YOU. ARE. THE. DEAD. Oh my God. I got the chills so many times toward the end of this book. It completely blew my mind. It managed to surpass my high expectations AND be nothing at all like I expected. Or in Newspeak "Double Plus Good." Let me preface this with an apology. If I sound stunningly inarticulate at times in this review, I can't help it. My mind is completely fried.

This book is like the dystopian Lord of the Rings, with its richly developed culture and economics, not to mention a fully developed language called Newspeak, or rather more of the anti-language, whose purpose is to limit speech and understanding instead of to enhance and expand it. The world-building is so fully fleshed out and spine-tinglingly terrifying that it's almost as if George travelled to such a place, escaped from it, and then just wrote it all down.

I read Fahrenheit 451 over ten years ago in my early teens. At the time, I remember really wanting to read 1984, although I never managed to get my hands on it. I'm almost glad I didn't. Though I would not have admitted it at the time, it would have gone over my head. Or at the very least, I wouldn't have been able to appreciate it fully. […]

The New York Times reviews Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry :

Three-quarters of the way through Lisa Halliday’s debut novel, “Asymmetry,” a British foreign correspondent named Alistair is spending Christmas on a compound outside of Baghdad. His fellow revelers include cameramen, defense contractors, United Nations employees and aid workers. Someone’s mother has FedExed a HoneyBaked ham from Maine; people are smoking by the swimming pool. It is 2003, just days after Saddam Hussein’s capture, and though the mood is optimistic, Alistair is worrying aloud about the ethics of his chosen profession, wondering if reporting on violence doesn’t indirectly abet violence and questioning why he’d rather be in a combat zone than reading a picture book to his son. But every time he returns to London, he begins to “spin out.” He can’t go home. “You observe what people do with their freedom — what they don’t do — and it’s impossible not to judge them for it,” he says.

The line, embedded unceremoniously in the middle of a page-long paragraph, doubles, like so many others in “Asymmetry,” as literary criticism. Halliday’s novel is so strange and startlingly smart that its mere existence seems like commentary on the state of fiction. One finishes “Asymmetry” for the first or second (or like this reader, third) time and is left wondering what other writers are not doing with their freedom — and, like Alistair, judging them for it.

Despite its title, “Asymmetry” comprises two seemingly unrelated sections of equal length, appended by a slim and quietly shocking coda. Halliday’s prose is clean and lean, almost reportorial in the style of W. G. Sebald, and like the murmurings of a shy person at a cocktail party, often comic only in single clauses. It’s a first novel that reads like the work of an author who has published many books over many years. […]

Emily W. Thompson reviews Michael Doane's The Crossing on Reedsy Discovery :

In Doane’s debut novel, a young man embarks on a journey of self-discovery with surprising results.

An unnamed protagonist (The Narrator) is dealing with heartbreak. His love, determined to see the world, sets out for Portland, Oregon. But he’s a small-town boy who hasn’t traveled much. So, the Narrator mourns her loss and hides from life, throwing himself into rehabbing an old motorcycle. Until one day, he takes a leap; he packs his bike and a few belongings and heads out to find the Girl.

Following in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac and William Least Heat-Moon, Doane offers a coming of age story about a man finding himself on the backroads of America. Doane’s a gifted writer with fluid prose and insightful observations, using The Narrator’s personal interactions to illuminate the diversity of the United States.

The Narrator initially sticks to the highways, trying to make it to the West Coast as quickly as possible. But a hitchhiker named Duke convinces him to get off the beaten path and enjoy the ride. “There’s not a place that’s like any other,” [39] Dukes contends, and The Narrator realizes he’s right. Suddenly, the trip is about the journey, not just the destination. The Narrator ditches his truck and traverses the deserts and mountains on his bike. He destroys his phone, cutting off ties with his past and living only in the moment.

As he crosses the country, The Narrator connects with several unique personalities whose experiences and views deeply impact his own. Duke, the complicated cowboy and drifter, who opens The Narrator’s eyes to a larger world. Zooey, the waitress in Colorado who opens his heart and reminds him that love can be found in this big world. And Rosie, The Narrator’s sweet landlady in Portland, who helps piece him back together both physically and emotionally.

This supporting cast of characters is excellent. Duke, in particular, is wonderfully nuanced and complicated. He’s a throwback to another time, a man without a cell phone who reads Sartre and sleeps under the stars. Yet he’s also a grifter with a “love ‘em and leave ‘em” attitude that harms those around him. It’s fascinating to watch The Narrator wrestle with Duke’s behavior, trying to determine which to model and which to discard.

Doane creates a relatable protagonist in The Narrator, whose personal growth doesn’t erase his faults. His willingness to hit the road with few resources is admirable, and he’s prescient enough to recognize the jealousy of those who cannot or will not take the leap. His encounters with new foods, places, and people broaden his horizons. Yet his immaturity and selfishness persist. He tells Rosie she’s been a good mother to him but chooses to ignore the continuing concern from his own parents as he effectively disappears from his old life.

Despite his flaws, it’s a pleasure to accompany The Narrator on his physical and emotional journey. The unexpected ending is a fitting denouement to an epic and memorable road trip.

The Book Smugglers review Anissa Gray’s The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls :

I am still dipping my toes into the literally fiction pool, finding what works for me and what doesn’t. Books like The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray are definitely my cup of tea.

Althea and Proctor Cochran had been pillars of their economically disadvantaged community for years – with their local restaurant/small market and their charity drives. Until they are found guilty of fraud for stealing and keeping most of the money they raised and sent to jail. Now disgraced, their entire family is suffering the consequences, specially their twin teenage daughters Baby Vi and Kim.  To complicate matters even more: Kim was actually the one to call the police on her parents after yet another fight with her mother. […]

Examples of children’s and YA fiction book reviews

The Book Hookup reviews Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give :

♥ Quick Thoughts and Rating: 5 stars! I can’t imagine how challenging it would be to tackle the voice of a movement like Black Lives Matter, but I do know that Thomas did it with a finesse only a talented author like herself possibly could. With an unapologetically realistic delivery packed with emotion, The Hate U Give is a crucially important portrayal of the difficulties minorities face in our country every single day. I have no doubt that this book will be met with resistance by some (possibly many) and slapped with a “controversial” label, but if you’ve ever wondered what it was like to walk in a POC’s shoes, then I feel like this is an unflinchingly honest place to start.

In Angie Thomas’s debut novel, Starr Carter bursts on to the YA scene with both heart-wrecking and heartwarming sincerity. This author is definitely one to watch.

♥ Review: The hype around this book has been unquestionable and, admittedly, that made me both eager to get my hands on it and terrified to read it. I mean, what if I was to be the one person that didn’t love it as much as others? (That seems silly now because of how truly mesmerizing THUG was in the most heartbreakingly realistic way.) However, with the relevancy of its summary in regards to the unjust predicaments POC currently face in the US, I knew this one was a must-read, so I was ready to set my fears aside and dive in. That said, I had an altogether more personal, ulterior motive for wanting to read this book. […]

The New York Times reviews Melissa Albert’s The Hazel Wood :

Alice Crewe (a last name she’s chosen for herself) is a fairy tale legacy: the granddaughter of Althea Proserpine, author of a collection of dark-as-night fairy tales called “Tales From the Hinterland.” The book has a cult following, and though Alice has never met her grandmother, she’s learned a little about her through internet research. She hasn’t read the stories, because her mother, Ella Proserpine, forbids it.

Alice and Ella have moved from place to place in an attempt to avoid the “bad luck” that seems to follow them. Weird things have happened. As a child, Alice was kidnapped by a man who took her on a road trip to find her grandmother; he was stopped by the police before they did so. When at 17 she sees that man again, unchanged despite the years, Alice panics. Then Ella goes missing, and Alice turns to Ellery Finch, a schoolmate who’s an Althea Proserpine superfan, for help in tracking down her mother. Not only has Finch read every fairy tale in the collection, but handily, he remembers them, sharing them with Alice as they journey to the mysterious Hazel Wood, the estate of her now-dead grandmother, where they hope to find Ella.

“The Hazel Wood” starts out strange and gets stranger, in the best way possible. (The fairy stories Finch relays, which Albert includes as their own chapters, are as creepy and evocative as you’d hope.) Albert seamlessly combines contemporary realism with fantasy, blurring the edges in a way that highlights that place where stories and real life convene, where magic contains truth and the world as it appears is false, where just about anything can happen, particularly in the pages of a very good book. It’s a captivating debut. […]

James reviews Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight, Moon on Goodreads:

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown is one of the books that followers of my blog voted as a must-read for our Children's Book August 2018 Readathon. Come check it out and join the next few weeks!

This picture book was such a delight. I hadn't remembered reading it when I was a child, but it might have been read to me... either way, it was like a whole new experience! It's always so difficult to convince a child to fall asleep at night. I don't have kids, but I do have a 5-month-old puppy who whines for 5 minutes every night when he goes in his cage/crate (hopefully he'll be fully housebroken soon so he can roam around when he wants). I can only imagine! I babysat a lot as a teenager and I have tons of younger cousins, nieces, and nephews, so I've been through it before, too. This was a believable experience, and it really helps show kids how to relax and just let go when it's time to sleep.

The bunny's are adorable. The rhymes are exquisite. I found it pretty fun, but possibly a little dated given many of those things aren't normal routines anymore. But the lessons to take from it are still powerful. Loved it! I want to sample some more books by this fine author and her illustrators.

Publishers Weekly reviews Elizabeth Lilly’s Geraldine :

This funny, thoroughly accomplished debut opens with two words: “I’m moving.” They’re spoken by the title character while she swoons across her family’s ottoman, and because Geraldine is a giraffe, her full-on melancholy mode is quite a spectacle. But while Geraldine may be a drama queen (even her mother says so), it won’t take readers long to warm up to her. The move takes Geraldine from Giraffe City, where everyone is like her, to a new school, where everyone else is human. Suddenly, the former extrovert becomes “That Giraffe Girl,” and all she wants to do is hide, which is pretty much impossible. “Even my voice tries to hide,” she says, in the book’s most poignant moment. “It’s gotten quiet and whispery.” Then she meets Cassie, who, though human, is also an outlier (“I’m that girl who wears glasses and likes MATH and always organizes her food”), and things begin to look up.

Lilly’s watercolor-and-ink drawings are as vividly comic and emotionally astute as her writing; just when readers think there are no more ways for Geraldine to contort her long neck, this highly promising talent comes up with something new.

Examples of genre fiction book reviews

Karlyn P reviews Nora Roberts’ Dark Witch , a paranormal romance novel , on Goodreads:

4 stars. Great world-building, weak romance, but still worth the read.

I hesitate to describe this book as a 'romance' novel simply because the book spent little time actually exploring the romance between Iona and Boyle. Sure, there IS a romance in this novel. Sprinkled throughout the book are a few scenes where Iona and Boyle meet, chat, wink at each, flirt some more, sleep together, have a misunderstanding, make up, and then profess their undying love. Very formulaic stuff, and all woven around the more important parts of this book.

The meat of this book is far more focused on the story of the Dark witch and her magically-gifted descendants living in Ireland. Despite being weak on the romance, I really enjoyed it. I think the book is probably better for it, because the romance itself was pretty lackluster stuff.

I absolutely plan to stick with this series as I enjoyed the world building, loved the Ireland setting, and was intrigued by all of the secondary characters. However, If you read Nora Roberts strictly for the romance scenes, this one might disappoint. But if you enjoy a solid background story with some dark magic and prophesies, you might enjoy it as much as I did.

I listened to this one on audio, and felt the narration was excellent.

Emily May reviews R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy Wars , an epic fantasy novel , on Goodreads:

“But I warn you, little warrior. The price of power is pain.”

Holy hell, what did I just read??

➽ A fantasy military school

➽ A rich world based on modern Chinese history

➽ Shamans and gods

➽ Detailed characterization leading to unforgettable characters

➽ Adorable, opium-smoking mentors

That's a basic list, but this book is all of that and SO MUCH MORE. I know 100% that The Poppy War will be one of my best reads of 2018.

Isn't it just so great when you find one of those books that completely drags you in, makes you fall in love with the characters, and demands that you sit on the edge of your seat for every horrific, nail-biting moment of it? This is one of those books for me. And I must issue a serious content warning: this book explores some very dark themes. Proceed with caution (or not at all) if you are particularly sensitive to scenes of war, drug use and addiction, genocide, racism, sexism, ableism, self-harm, torture, and rape (off-page but extremely horrific).

Because, despite the fairly innocuous first 200 pages, the title speaks the truth: this is a book about war. All of its horrors and atrocities. It is not sugar-coated, and it is often graphic. The "poppy" aspect refers to opium, which is a big part of this book. It is a fantasy, but the book draws inspiration from the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Rape of Nanking.

Crime Fiction Lover reviews Jessica Barry’s Freefall , a crime novel:

In some crime novels, the wrongdoing hits you between the eyes from page one. With others it’s a more subtle process, and that’s OK too. So where does Freefall fit into the sliding scale?

In truth, it’s not clear. This is a novel with a thrilling concept at its core. A woman survives plane crash, then runs for her life. However, it is the subtleties at play that will draw you in like a spider beckoning to an unwitting fly.

Like the heroine in Sharon Bolton’s Dead Woman Walking, Allison is lucky to be alive. She was the only passenger in a private plane, belonging to her fiancé, Ben, who was piloting the expensive aircraft, when it came down in woodlands in the Colorado Rockies. Ally is also the only survivor, but rather than sitting back and waiting for rescue, she is soon pulling together items that may help her survive a little longer – first aid kit, energy bars, warm clothes, trainers – before fleeing the scene. If you’re hearing the faint sound of alarm bells ringing, get used to it. There’s much, much more to learn about Ally before this tale is over.

Kirkus Reviews reviews Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One , a science-fiction novel :

Video-game players embrace the quest of a lifetime in a virtual world; screenwriter Cline’s first novel is old wine in new bottles.

The real world, in 2045, is the usual dystopian horror story. So who can blame Wade, our narrator, if he spends most of his time in a virtual world? The 18-year-old, orphaned at 11, has no friends in his vertical trailer park in Oklahoma City, while the OASIS has captivating bells and whistles, and it’s free. Its creator, the legendary billionaire James Halliday, left a curious will. He had devised an elaborate online game, a hunt for a hidden Easter egg. The finder would inherit his estate. Old-fashioned riddles lead to three keys and three gates. Wade, or rather his avatar Parzival, is the first gunter (egg-hunter) to win the Copper Key, first of three.

Halliday was obsessed with the pop culture of the 1980s, primarily the arcade games, so the novel is as much retro as futurist. Parzival’s great strength is that he has absorbed all Halliday’s obsessions; he knows by heart three essential movies, crossing the line from geek to freak. His most formidable competitors are the Sixers, contract gunters working for the evil conglomerate IOI, whose goal is to acquire the OASIS. Cline’s narrative is straightforward but loaded with exposition. It takes a while to reach a scene that crackles with excitement: the meeting between Parzival (now world famous as the lead contender) and Sorrento, the head of IOI. The latter tries to recruit Parzival; when he fails, he issues and executes a death threat. Wade’s trailer is demolished, his relatives killed; luckily Wade was not at home. Too bad this is the dramatic high point. Parzival threads his way between more ’80s games and movies to gain the other keys; it’s clever but not exciting. Even a romance with another avatar and the ultimate “epic throwdown” fail to stir the blood.

Too much puzzle-solving, not enough suspense.

Book review examples for non-fiction books

Nonfiction books are generally written to inform readers about a certain topic. As such, the focus of a nonfiction book review will be on the clarity and effectiveness of this communication . In carrying this out, a book review may analyze the author’s source materials and assess the thesis in order to determine whether or not the book meets expectations.

Again, we’ve included abbreviated versions of long reviews here, so feel free to click on the link to read the entire piece!

The Washington Post reviews David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon :

The arc of David Grann’s career reminds one of a software whiz-kid or a latest-thing talk-show host — certainly not an investigative reporter, even if he is one of the best in the business. The newly released movie of his first book, “The Lost City of Z,” is generating all kinds of Oscar talk, and now comes the release of his second book, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” the film rights to which have already been sold for $5 million in what one industry journal called the “biggest and wildest book rights auction in memory.”

Grann deserves the attention. He’s canny about the stories he chases, he’s willing to go anywhere to chase them, and he’s a maestro in his ability to parcel out information at just the right clip: a hint here, a shading of meaning there, a smartly paced buildup of multiple possibilities followed by an inevitable reversal of readerly expectations or, in some cases, by a thrilling and dislocating pull of the entire narrative rug.

All of these strengths are on display in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Around the turn of the 20th century, oil was discovered underneath Osage lands in the Oklahoma Territory, lands that were soon to become part of the state of Oklahoma. Through foresight and legal maneuvering, the Osage found a way to permanently attach that oil to themselves and shield it from the prying hands of white interlopers; this mechanism was known as “headrights,” which forbade the outright sale of oil rights and granted each full member of the tribe — and, supposedly, no one else — a share in the proceeds from any lease arrangement. For a while, the fail-safes did their job, and the Osage got rich — diamond-ring and chauffeured-car and imported-French-fashion rich — following which quite a large group of white men started to work like devils to separate the Osage from their money. And soon enough, and predictably enough, this work involved murder. Here in Jazz Age America’s most isolated of locales, dozens or even hundreds of Osage in possession of great fortunes — and of the potential for even greater fortunes in the future — were dispatched by poison, by gunshot and by dynamite. […]

Stacked Books reviews Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers :

I’ve heard a lot of great things about Malcolm Gladwell’s writing. Friends and co-workers tell me that his subjects are interesting and his writing style is easy to follow without talking down to the reader. I wasn’t disappointed with Outliers. In it, Gladwell tackles the subject of success – how people obtain it and what contributes to extraordinary success as opposed to everyday success.

The thesis – that our success depends much more on circumstances out of our control than any effort we put forth – isn’t exactly revolutionary. Most of us know it to be true. However, I don’t think I’m lying when I say that most of us also believe that we if we just try that much harder and develop our talent that much further, it will be enough to become wildly successful, despite bad or just mediocre beginnings. Not so, says Gladwell.

Most of the evidence Gladwell gives us is anecdotal, which is my favorite kind to read. I can’t really speak to how scientifically valid it is, but it sure makes for engrossing listening. For example, did you know that successful hockey players are almost all born in January, February, or March? Kids born during these months are older than the others kids when they start playing in the youth leagues, which means they’re already better at the game (because they’re bigger). Thus, they get more play time, which means their skill increases at a faster rate, and it compounds as time goes by. Within a few years, they’re much, much better than the kids born just a few months later in the year. Basically, these kids’ birthdates are a huge factor in their success as adults – and it’s nothing they can do anything about. If anyone could make hockey interesting to a Texan who only grudgingly admits the sport even exists, it’s Gladwell. […]

Quill and Quire reviews Rick Prashaw’s Soar, Adam, Soar :

Ten years ago, I read a book called Almost Perfect. The young-adult novel by Brian Katcher won some awards and was held up as a powerful, nuanced portrayal of a young trans person. But the reality did not live up to the book’s billing. Instead, it turned out to be a one-dimensional and highly fetishized portrait of a trans person’s life, one that was nevertheless repeatedly dubbed “realistic” and “affecting” by non-transgender readers possessing only a vague, mass-market understanding of trans experiences.

In the intervening decade, trans narratives have emerged further into the literary spotlight, but those authored by trans people ourselves – and by trans men in particular – have seemed to fall under the shadow of cisgender sensationalized imaginings. Two current Canadian releases – Soar, Adam, Soar and This One Looks Like a Boy – provide a pointed object lesson into why trans-authored work about transgender experiences remains critical.

To be fair, Soar, Adam, Soar isn’t just a story about a trans man. It’s also a story about epilepsy, the medical establishment, and coming of age as seen through a grieving father’s eyes. Adam, Prashaw’s trans son, died unexpectedly at age 22. Woven through the elder Prashaw’s narrative are excerpts from Adam’s social media posts, giving us glimpses into the young man’s interior life as he traverses his late teens and early 20s. […]

Book Geeks reviews Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love :

WRITING STYLE: 3.5/5

SUBJECT: 4/5

CANDIDNESS: 4.5/5

RELEVANCE: 3.5/5

ENTERTAINMENT QUOTIENT: 3.5/5

“Eat Pray Love” is so popular that it is almost impossible to not read it. Having felt ashamed many times on my not having read this book, I quietly ordered the book (before I saw the movie) from amazon.in and sat down to read it. I don’t remember what I expected it to be – maybe more like a chick lit thing but it turned out quite different. The book is a real story and is a short journal from the time when its writer went travelling to three different countries in pursuit of three different things – Italy (Pleasure), India (Spirituality), Bali (Balance) and this is what corresponds to the book’s name – EAT (in Italy), PRAY (in India) and LOVE (in Bali, Indonesia). These are also the three Is – ITALY, INDIA, INDONESIA.

Though she had everything a middle-aged American woman can aspire for – MONEY, CAREER, FRIENDS, HUSBAND; Elizabeth was not happy in her life, she wasn’t happy in her marriage. Having suffered a terrible divorce and terrible breakup soon after, Elizabeth was shattered. She didn’t know where to go and what to do – all she knew was that she wanted to run away. So she set out on a weird adventure – she will go to three countries in a year and see if she can find out what she was looking for in life. This book is about that life changing journey that she takes for one whole year. […]

Emily May reviews Michelle Obama’s Becoming on Goodreads:

Look, I'm not a happy crier. I might cry at songs about leaving and missing someone; I might cry at books where things don't work out; I might cry at movies where someone dies. I've just never really understood why people get all choked up over happy, inspirational things. But Michelle Obama's kindness and empathy changed that. This book had me in tears for all the right reasons.

This is not really a book about politics, though political experiences obviously do come into it. It's a shame that some will dismiss this book because of a difference in political opinion, when it is really about a woman's life. About growing up poor and black on the South Side of Chicago; about getting married and struggling to maintain that marriage; about motherhood; about being thrown into an amazing and terrifying position.

I hate words like "inspirational" because they've become so overdone and cheesy, but I just have to say it-- Michelle Obama is an inspiration. I had the privilege of seeing her speak at The Forum in Inglewood, and she is one of the warmest, funniest, smartest, down-to-earth people I have ever seen in this world.

And yes, I know we present what we want the world to see, but I truly do think it's genuine. I think she is someone who really cares about people - especially kids - and wants to give them better lives and opportunities.

She's obviously intelligent, but she also doesn't gussy up her words. She talks straight, with an openness and honesty rarely seen. She's been one of the most powerful women in the world, she's been a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, she's had her own successful career, and yet she has remained throughout that same girl - Michelle Robinson - from a working class family in Chicago.

I don't think there's anyone who wouldn't benefit from reading this book.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better idea of how to write a book review. You might be wondering how to put all of this knowledge into action now! Many book reviewers start out by setting up a book blog. If you don’t have time to research the intricacies of HTML, check out Reedsy Discovery — where you can read indie books for free and review them without going through the hassle of creating a blog. To register as a book reviewer , go here .

And if you’d like to see even more book review examples, simply go to this directory of book review blogs and click on any one of them to see a wealth of good book reviews. Beyond that, it's up to you to pick up a book and pen — and start reviewing!

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[2023] The Ultimate Guide to Writing a Story Book Review: Tips, Examples, and Format

• June 9, 2023
• Book Reviews

Are you a book lover who enjoys sharing your opinions on books with others? Are you curious about writing book reviews, but not sure where to start? Look no further than Book Summary Review™! Our team of expert book lovers has put together the ultimate guide to writing story book reviews. In this article, we will provide tips, examples, and the format for writing a compelling and informative story book review. Read on to become an expert story book reviewer!

What is a Story Book Review?

A story book review is an evaluation of a book that summarizes, analyzes, and critiques its contents. It is a way for readers to share their thoughts and opinions with others, and to help other readers make informed decisions about what they should read next.

The Importance of Story Book Reviews

Story book reviews are important for several reasons. They provide feedback to authors and publishers, helping them to improve their work and meet the needs of their readers. They also help readers to select books that are well-written, engaging, and enjoyable. Book reviews can also create a sense of community among readers, encouraging them to share their thoughts and opinions on books with others.

What Must a Story Book Review Contain?

A story book review should contain several key elements. These include a summary of the plot, an analysis of the themes and characters, and an overall evaluation of the book. Below, we’ll break down each of these elements in more detail.

Summary of the Plot

When writing a summary of the plot, it’s important to avoid spoilers. Stick to the basic structure of the plot, including the beginning, middle, and end. Mention the main characters and their motives, but be careful not to give away the ending.

Analysis of the Themes and Characters

In the analysis section, you’ll want to examine the themes and characters of the book. Consider the author’s style, themes, and motifs. Discuss the characters in terms of their development and complexity. Look for symbols, metaphors, and imagery that reveal deeper meanings.

Overall Evaluation of the Book

The overall evaluation is where you’ll share your thoughts and opinions on the book. Consider the book’s strengths and weaknesses, and give examples to support your arguments. Be honest and fair in your assessment, and provide recommendations for other readers.

Book Review Examples for Fiction Books

Now that we’ve covered the basics of story book reviews, let’s look at book review examples for fiction books. Each example will contain a summary, analysis, and evaluation of the book.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee

Summary: "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a coming-of-age story set in the 1930s in Alabama. Scout Finch, a young girl, is growing up during the Great Depression and is surrounded by racism and prejudice. Her father, Atticus Finch, is a lawyer who is defending an African-American man accused of rape. The story follows Scout’s journey as she learns about injustice, human dignity, and courage.

Analysis: "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a classic American novel that explores themes of racism, prejudice, and justice. The characters are well-developed, and their motivations are complex. Harper Lee’s writing is simple yet powerful, and she creates vivid descriptions of the rural southern town. The novel is full of symbols and imagery, such as the mockingbird and the oak tree, that reveal deeper meanings.

Evaluation: "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a must-read for anyone interested in American literature. It is a timeless story that explores important social issues and human nature. Harper Lee’s writing is both poignant and humorous, and the characters are unforgettable. Overall, "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a masterpiece that will leave a lasting impression on readers.

Book Review Examples for Non-Fiction Books

Non-fiction books can also benefit from story book reviews. Here’s an example of a book review for a non-fiction book:

"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari

Summary: "Sapiens" is a book that spans the entire history of humankind, from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa to the present day. It covers topics such as the agricultural revolution, the rise of empires, and the impact of technology on society. The book is divided into four parts: The Cognitive Revolution, The Agricultural Revolution, The Unification of Humankind, and The Scientific Revolution.

Analysis: "Sapiens" is a fascinating exploration of human history that challenges traditional narratives about our past. Yuval Noah Harari’s writing is engaging and accessible, and he provides many thought-provoking insights. The book is filled with interesting facts and anecdotes, and it provides a holistic view of the human experience. Harari’s thesis, that the story of humankind is a collective fiction, is both compelling and believable.

Evaluation: "Sapiens" is a book that will change the way you think about human history. It is an ambitious project that is executed flawlessly. Harari’s writing is both informative and entertaining, and the book is full of surprises. Whether you’re a history buff or just curious about the human experience, "Sapiens" is a must-read.

The Simple Format of a Story Book Review

While story book reviews can vary in length and structure, there is a simple format that you can follow to get started. Here’s an example:

Introduction: Introduce the book and provide some background information.

Summary: Provide a brief summary of the plot or contents of the book.

Analysis: Analyze the themes, characters, and style of the book.

Evaluation: Share your overall evaluation of the book and provide recommendations.

Conclusion: Sum up the main points of your review and provide a final thought.

Quick Tips and Facts

Here are some quick tips and facts to keep in mind when writing a story book review:

• Read the book carefully and take notes as you go.
• Avoid spoilers and focus on the main points of the book.
• Use quotes and examples to support your arguments.
• Be honest and fair in your assessment of the book.
• Use a professional and engaging tone.

The Pros and Cons of Writing Story Book Reviews

As with any activity, there are pros and cons to writing story book reviews. Here are a few to consider:

• Improve your reading and writing skills.
• Share your thoughts and opinions with others.
• Engage in a community of readers.
• Help authors and publishers improve their work.
• Develop your critical thinking skills.
• Time-consuming and requires effort.
• May lead to negative feedback from others.
• Can be challenging to remain objective.
• May require reading books that you don’t enjoy.

Ask the Expert: Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some frequently asked questions about story book reviews:

What Are the 5 Parts of a Book Review?

The five parts of a book review are the introduction, summary, analysis, evaluation, and conclusion.

What Is the Simple Format of a Book Review?

The simple format of a book review includes an introduction, summary, analysis, evaluation, and conclusion. It is a clear and concise way to structure your review.

What Is a Story Book Review?

Final thoughts.

Writing story book reviews can be a rewarding and enjoyable experience. By following the tips and examples in this guide, you’ll be well on your way to becoming an expert story book reviewer. Remember to read the book carefully, be objective and fair in your assessment, and use a professional and engaging tone. Happy reading!

Review Team

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How to Write a Book Review: The Complete Guide

by Sue Weems | 23 comments

Free Book Planning Course!  Sign up for our 3-part book planning course and make your book writing easy . It expires soon, though, so don’t wait.  Sign up here before the deadline!

If you've ever loved (or hated) a book, you may have been tempted to review it. Here's a complete guide to how to write a book review, so you can share your literary adventures with other readers more often! 

You finally reach the last page of a book that kept you up all night and close it with the afterglow of satisfaction and a tinge of regret that it’s over. If you enjoyed the book enough to stay up reading it way past your bedtime, consider writing a review. It is one of the best gifts you can give an author.

Regardless of how much you know about how to write a book review, the author will appreciate hearing how their words touched you.

But as you face the five shaded stars and empty box, a blank mind strikes. What do I say? I mean, is this a book really deserving of five stars? How did it compare to Dostoevsky or Angelou or Dickens?

Maybe there’s an easier way to write a book review.

Want to learn how to write a book from start to finish? Check out How to Write a Book: The Complete Guide .

The Fallacy of Book Reviews

Once you’ve decided to give a review, you are faced with the task of deciding how many stars to give a book.

When I first started writing book reviews, I made the mistake of trying to compare a book to ALL BOOKS OF ALL TIME. (Sorry for the all caps, but that’s how it felt, like a James Earl Jones voice was asking me where to put this book in the queue of all books.)

Other readers find themselves comparing new titles to their favorite books. It's a natural comparison. But is it fair?

This is honestly why I didn’t give reviews of books for a long time. How can I compare a modern romance or historical fiction war novel with Dostoevsky? I can’t, and I shouldn’t.

I realized my mistake one day as I was watching (of all things) a dog show. In the final round, they trotted out dogs of all shapes, colors, and sizes. I thought, “How can a Yorkshire Terrier compete with a Basset Hound?” As if he'd read my mind, the announcer explained that each is judged by the standards for its breed.

This was my “Aha!” moment. I have to take a book on its own terms. The question is not, “How does this book compare to all books I’ve read?” but “How well did this book deliver what it promised for the intended audience?”

A review is going to reflect my personal experience with the book, but I can help potential readers by taking a minute to consider what the author intended. Let me explain what I mean. 

How to Write a Book Review: Consider a Book’s Promise

A book makes a promise with its cover, blurb, and first pages. It begins to set expectations the minute a reader views the thumbnail or cover. Those things indicate the genre, tone, and likely the major themes.

If a book cover includes a lip-locked couple in flowing linen on a beach, and I open to the first page to read about a pimpled vampire in a trench coat speaking like Mr. Knightly about his plan for revenge on the entire human race, there’s been a breach of contract before I even get to page two. These are the books we put down immediately (unless a mixed-message beachy cover combined with an Austen vampire story is your thing).

But what if the cover, blurb, and first pages are cohesive and perk our interest enough to keep reading? Then we have to think about what the book has promised us, which revolves around one key idea: What is the core story question and how well is it resolved?

Sometimes genre expectations help us answer this question: a romance will end with a couple who finds their way, a murder mystery ends with a solved case, a thriller’s protagonist beats the clock and saves the country or planet.

The stories we love most do those expected things in a fresh or surprising way with characters we root for from the first page. Even (and especially!) when a book doesn’t fit neatly in a genre category, we need to consider what the book promises on those first pages and decide how well it succeeds on the terms it sets for itself.

When I Don’t Know What to Write

About a month ago, I realized I was overthinking how to write a book review. Here at the Write Practice we have a longstanding tradition of giving critiques using the Oreo method : point out something that was a strength, then something we wondered about or that confused us, followed by another positive.

We can use this same structure to write a simple review when we finish books. Consider this book review format: 

[Book Title] by [book author] is about ___[plot summary in a sentence—no spoilers!]___. I chose this book based on ________. I really enjoyed ________. I wondered how ___________. Anyone who likes ____ will love this book.

Following this basic template can help you write an honest review about most any book, and it will give the author or publisher good information about what worked (and possibly what didn’t). You might write about the characters, the conflict, the setting, or anything else that captured you and kept you reading.

As an added bonus, you will be a stronger reader when you are able to express why you enjoyed parts of a book (just like when you critique!). After you complete a few, you’ll find it gets easier, and you won’t need the template anymore.

What if I Didn’t Like It?

Like professional book reviewers, you will have to make the call about when to leave a negative review. If I can’t give a book at least three stars, I usually don’t review it. Why? If I don’t like a book after a couple chapters, I put it down. I don’t review anything that I haven’t read the entire book.

Also, it may be that I’m not the target audience. The book might be well-written and well-reviewed with a great cover, and it just doesn’t capture me. Or maybe it's a book that just isn't hitting me right now for reasons that have nothing to do with the book and everything to do with my own reading life and needs. Every book is not meant for every reader.

If a book kept me reading all the way to the end and I didn’t like the ending? I would probably still review it, since there had to be enough good things going on to keep me reading to the end. I might mention in my review that the ending was less satisfying than I hoped, but I would still end with a positive.

How to Write a Book Review: Your Turn

As writers, we know how difficult it is to put down the words day after day. We are typically voracious readers. Let’s send some love back out to our fellow writers this week and review the most recent title we enjoyed.

What was the last book you read or reviewed? Do you ever find it hard to review a book? Share in the comments .

Now it's your turn. Think of the last book you read. Then, take fifteen minutes to write a review of it based on the template above. When you're done, share your review in the Pro Practice Workshop . For bonus points, post it on the book's page on Amazon and Goodreads, too!

Don't forget to leave feedback for your fellow writers! What new reads will you discover in the comments?

Sue Weems is a writer, teacher, and traveler with an advanced degree in (mostly fictional) revenge. When she’s not rationalizing her love for parentheses (and dramatic asides), she follows a sailor around the globe with their four children, two dogs, and an impossibly tall stack of books to read. You can read more of her writing tips on her website .

23 Comments

The Ice Dragon by George R.R. Martin is about a girl that shows no emotion befriending a ice dragon.

I chose this book based on the cover that had a little girl riding a ice dragon, and wondered what is about.

I really enjoyed the interaction the little girl had with the dragon.

I wondered how how the girl’s bond with the dragon.

Anyone who likes a coming of age story set in a fantasy will love this book.

Thanks for sharing your practice, Azure!

You’re welcome.

A interesting, at times perplexing, subject! And one on my mind lately,as I’ve agreed to do a few. I do enjoy giving reviews and am delighted when I can say, “This was a great book!” Or even, “I enjoyed this book.” It gets perplexing when I agree to review a book — and simply don’t like it. Then what to say? I hate to disappoint the writer but I’ve promised to give my honest opinion.

I’ve found some books mediocre and yet I see a dozen other reviewers saying “A great story!” Tastes do vary. But when there are obvious flaws I tend to skip all the best-friend-and-cousin reviewers and find the first person who says, “This writer has a problem with…” Usually there’ll be a number of reviewers who spot the same problems I do.

I like upbeat main characters, but not aggressive, belligerent, and/or self-centered ones. I like to meet in a story the kind of people I’d like to meet in real life— not people I’d avoid if possible. I recently read a book where the main character came across as insipid and the story only mildly interesting. Other reviewers said it was great and I know for this specific audience — readers who want a certain slant to a story — it was quite suitable. So I tried to cut the book some slack. Everyone has their limit as to how much blood and gore, smooching and snuggling, they are willing to read about.

Once I agreed to review a book and would have tossed it after the first chapter — for several reasons. A lot of “writer inserting facts for reader’s benefit”; teach/preach paragraphs; excess of description; attitudes of MCs. Once it’s live on seller’s sites like Amazon, what can you say? The one thing good it had going for it was the story line or theme. With a pro editor’s help it could have been a great story.

As for a review, one book I read lately was “A Clue for the Puzzle Lady” by Parnell Hall. It’s one of those “Stayed up half the night to finish it” books; I think anyone who likes a compelling cozy mystery would probably like it. Downside: I didn’t care for the “Puzzle Lady.” She’s a lush, hangs out at the bar getting sloshed. The upside: her sensible niece has a starring role —trying to keep her aunt on the straight-and-narrow and the mystery keeps you guessing until the end.

Christine, Thanks for sharing your insight! It sounds like you are approached often to review new books. It does make it tricky if it’s a request, especially outside your own preferences. Thanks for chiming in about your process, as I’m sure others will appreciate the perspective too. I’ll have to take a look at the Puzzle Lady– I do enjoy cozy mysteries. Sue

Here’s another cozy mystery book review in case you’re interested. I’m not approached by writers that often, but there are the Story Cartel, Book Bub and Goodreads, all sites where authors ask for review volunteers.

Reel Estate Ripoff by Renee Pawlish

The detective Reed Ferguson is a fan of Humphry Bogart, movie memorabilia of that era, and fancies himself a bit of a Sam Slade. Though not your super-sleuth, rather inept at times, he’s a likeable character. Told in first person, the story has a Philip Marlowe tone to it, but much tamer. Dialogue and story line are well done, the story well plotted and believable. I’d gladly read more stories about this particular gumshoe.

If you like cozy mystery books, I’ll send you a list later, Sue. Love them too and I’ve met many authors who write in this genre. Back on topic– you inspire me again to add some reviews to my Blog. I have been reading and writing many middle grade mysteries for a project! My latest favorite: “The World’s Greatest Detective” by Caroline Carson (who I hope to meet tomorrow in Arlington, VA!) My 12 year old grandson borrowed it and finished it before I could. “It’s the best mystery I ever read, Grandma! You’ ll never guess the ending with unpredictable twists!” What better review could we read. The target audience and I both highly recommend this 2017 mystery.

Adding it to my stack, Beth. Thanks!

Not wanting to sound life an idiot, but willing to risk it here among friends: What exactly is a cozy mystery?

Glad you asked! It’s a subgenre of mystery. The best examples of cozy mysteries are those by Agatha Christie. They usually avoid profanity, excessive gore/ violence, and sex. They focus more on the puzzle, sleuth, and their smaller world. Hope that helps!

Thanks, Sue.

Wonderful article. The first I have read by you. It especially gets those of us who don’t feel we have the formula down for review writing to be introduced to a form we can build upon with experience. You’ve kept it simple but you have given us the main ingredients needed for a good review. I printed this one off to look at the next few times I write reviews. Thank you.

Glad you found it helpful. Thanks for reading and commenting!

I haven’t gone into all this. It’s a matter of time, Joe. I gad about all over the place, not knowing where I am or where I’m going. Within weeks, I’ll be 87. I’ve books of my own that I’d like to see reviewed. Even sorting them out, however, even finding where any of them are, would be a time burden. You see the fix?

Hi Dave, You aren’t alone in feeling the press of time for getting your stories out into the world. May I gently offer this: start with finding and sorting one. If you can’t find it, write it anew. You’ve probably grown in time and perspective since you wrote the first draft, which will make for a stronger story. Good luck. I’m cheering you on!

This is an article for me, because I am happy to receive a rating. I haven’t sold many books. But, at least some thinks that it was worth the time to read. That was refreshing. And, I think I wrote two reviews, so far. It was on Amazon.com. Thank you.

You’re welcome!

Hi, Sue. Thanks for the helpful advice. I did a review on Amazon for the first of a 7-part thriller titled ‘Mosh Pit (The Rose Garden Incident)’ by Michael Hiebert. [Here it is.]

“5.0 out of 5 stars Advance copy review. By A fellow author on September 18, 2016 Format: Kindle Edition I Recommend This Book Strongly

I enjoyed reading this first part of the thriller. The author’s opening chapter/prologue was fast paced, and set me in the middle of the inciting incident along with two of the main characters. After that thrilling opening, I felt the ensuing chapters moved at a more leisurely pace, and was about to grade them as less praiseworthy when I watched a lecture by Brandon Sanderson on YouTube about building three dimensional characters and realised Michael Hiebert had done exactly that by introducing the reader to the minutiae of other characters who had parts to play in the development of the story. So, instead of cardboard cutouts of bland stock characters, the author shows us real people with real concerns that the reader can relate to.and actually care about. I look forward to reading the rest of this intriguing thriller, and highly recommend it to all lovers of well-written, and well-crafted thrillers.”

I also reviewed Part 2 of the series, but that review is too long to post here.

Footnote: The author, Michael Hiebert, was so pleased with my reviews, he recently asked me to beta-read a short story collection he plans to publish in November.

Great review, John! I like how you shared a bit of your process as a reader too, in recognizing what the writer was doing with their characterization. Thanks!

Thank you, Sue.

Five out of five stars When I picked up a copy of “The Girl with All the Gifts,” by M R Carey, at the used book store, I somehow had it in my head that it was a YA dystopian novel along the lines of “Divergent” or “The Hunger Games.” While I would definitely say that I was not right about that, I wouldn’t say that I was completely wrong. I was, however, completely unprepared for a zombie novel–which is a good thing, cause I wouldn’t have read it, and I’m glad I did. Think “The Walking Dead” meets (why do I want to say ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night”?) “Peter Pan.” I really enjoyed seeing things from, the main character, Melanie’s point of view. Her limited knowledge of her own situation was intriguing, to say the least (and probably why I thought of “The Curious Incident”). I was a bit disappointed when the POV changed to another character’s, but, as the novel progressed, I found myself sympathizing with nearly all the characters–with one exception, and I’ll leave that for you to ponder when you read it. I wondered how much of the science was real, but not enough for me to research it myself. Although, based on other reviews, I guess most of the science about the fungus is real. I also wondered about the fate of the remaining ‘lost boys’ of the cities. If you liked…. well, I don’t know. I’m not typically a fan of things zombie, so I don’t have a comparison, but the book was somewhat similar to “Divergent” and “The Hunger Games” in that the main character goes through a hellluva time and comes out the other side with a plan for her future.

“Tuesdays with Morrie” by Mitch Albom is a true story about how one man found meaning in life when his doctors gave him a death sentence. Morrie was a college professor who passed on his new found wisdom in the last year of his life to a favorite student, the author, who chronicled his professor’s perspectives on death and dying.

I chose this book because of its philosophical topic, and because it is so well written that the words just jump off the page.

Knowing we are all mortal beings, I especially liked the insights, the tidbits of wisdom imparted by the dying man. Death is a subject that few, if any of us, ever talk about seriously with friends and family. The subject of death is verboten. We deny its existence. And, if we are religious, we pretend we will not really die, but we deceive ourselves and think we will live on in some afterlife existence for all eternity. But the professor, Morrie, learns some valuable life lessons from his impending death, and Mitch Albom was gracious enough to capture them in this short but eminently readable book.

I really liked the book because it is timeless. This true story will impart serious life lessons for all future generations, and will help us gain perspectives on our lives and the relationships with those we love the most.

R. Allan Worrell

Sue, I’ve been meaning to come back since this was first posted to tell you thanks for a great article. I seldom review books for alllllll the reasons you listed. This is a perfect tool and I’ll surely use it. Cathy

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How To Write A Book Review: 6 Steps To Take

Adiba Jaigirdar

Adiba Jaigirdar is an Irish-Bangladeshi writer, poet, and teacher. She resides in Dublin, Ireland and has an MA in postcolonial studies. She is currently working on her own postcolonial novel and hopes that someday it will see the light of day outside of her computer screen. Twitter:  @adiba_j

View All posts by Adiba Jaigirdar

Whether you’re a student, a novice blogger, or just someone looking to become a more active user of Goodreads, writing a book review is an important skill to have! Here are six steps for how to write a book review for school and beyond. 

1. Begin with a brief summary of the book

This is probably the best way to introduce any review because it gives context. But make sure to not go into too much detail. Keep it short and sweet since an official summary can be found through a quick google search!

2. Pick out the most important aspects of the book

I usually break this down with character, world-building, themes, and plot. But this might vary between books, genres, and your tastes!

Dedicate a paragraph to each of these important aspects, discussing how well the author dealt with it, along with what you enjoyed and what you didn’t enjoy.

3. Include brief quotes as examples

Including quotes is always a great idea, because it gives examples for everything that you’re saying! If your review talks about a character being particularly witty, a witty line from the character lets your readers see exactly what kind of witty character you’re dealing with here.

But be careful: lengthy quotes can take up big chunks of space and overpower your review. Short quotes will usually get your points across while letting your work shine through.

4. Write a conclusion that summarises everything

Like your introduction, keep your conclusion short and sweet! It should bring up the main points of your review, along with your overall opinion of the book.

5. Find similar books

A great way to wrap up a review is to find similar books to the one you’re reviewing. So you can say, “if you were a fan of X book, I think you’ll definitely like this one!”

You can also be more specific, looking at the exact things that might make two books similar. So you can suggest something like…“if you liked that the main character in X book was a kick-ass superhero, then you’ll love the main character of this book!”

6. Give it a star rating

A star rating is obviously encouraged in a lot of review sites, but they’re not necessary! If you do want to give a star rating, you can go the conventional “out of five/ten” route. You could also try something slightly less conventional, and break down your star-rating into different categories for character/plot/world-building, etc.

Now go forth and review! And share any tips you have for how to write a book review in the comments.

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How to Write a Book Review: A Comprehensive Tutorial With Examples

You don’t need to be a literary expert to craft captivating book reviews. With one in every three readers selecting books based on insightful reviews, your opinions can guide fellow bibliophiles toward their next literary adventure.

Learning how to write a book review will not only help you excel at your assigned tasks, but you’ll also contribute valuable insights to the book-loving community and turn your passion into a professional pursuit.

In this comprehensive guide,  PaperPerk  will walk you through a few simple steps to master the art of writing book reviews so you can confidently embark on this rewarding journey.

What is a Book Review?

A book review is a critical evaluation of a book, offering insights into its content, quality, and impact. It helps readers make informed decisions about whether to read the book.

Writing a book review as an assignment benefits students in multiple ways. Firstly, it teaches them how to write a book review by developing their analytical skills as they evaluate the content, themes, and writing style .

Secondly, it enhances their ability to express opinions and provide constructive criticism. Additionally, book review assignments expose students to various publications and genres, broadening their knowledge.

Furthermore, these tasks foster essential skills for academic success, like critical thinking and the ability to synthesize information. By now, we’re sure you want to learn how to write a book review, so let’s look at the book review template first.

Table of Contents

Book Review Template

How to write a book review- a step by step guide.

Check out these 5 straightforward steps for composing the best book review.

Step 1: Planning Your Book Review – The Art of Getting Started

You’ve decided to take the plunge and share your thoughts on a book that has captivated (or perhaps disappointed) you. Before you start book reviewing, let’s take a step back and plan your approach. Since knowing how to write a book review that’s both informative and engaging is an art in itself.

Choosing Your Literature

First things first, pick the book you want to review. This might seem like a no-brainer, but selecting a book that genuinely interests you will make the review process more enjoyable and your insights more authentic.

Crafting the Master Plan

Next, create an  outline  that covers all the essential points you want to discuss in your review. This will serve as the roadmap for your writing journey.

The Devil is in the Details

As you read, note any information that stands out, whether it overwhelms, underwhelms, or simply intrigues you. Pay attention to:

• The characters and their development
• The plot and its intricacies
• Any themes, symbols, or motifs you find noteworthy

Remember to reserve a body paragraph for each point you want to discuss.

The Key Questions to Ponder

When planning your book review, consider the following questions:

• What’s the plot (if any)? Understanding the driving force behind the book will help you craft a more effective review.
• Is the plot interesting? Did the book hold your attention and keep you turning the pages?
• Are the writing techniques effective? Does the author’s style captivate you, making you want to read (or reread) the text?
• Are the characters or the information believable? Do the characters/plot/information feel real, and can you relate to them?
• Would you recommend the book to anyone? Consider if the book is worthy of being recommended, whether to impress someone or to support a point in a literature class.
• What could improve? Always keep an eye out for areas that could be improved. Providing constructive criticism can enhance the quality of literature.

Step 2 – Crafting the Perfect Introduction to Write a Book Review

In this second step of “how to write a book review,” we’re focusing on the art of creating a powerful opening that will hook your audience and set the stage for your analysis.

Identify Your Book and Author

Begin by mentioning the book you’ve chosen, including its  title  and the author’s name. This informs your readers and establishes the subject of your review.

Ponder the Title

Next, discuss the mental images or emotions the book’s title evokes in your mind . This helps your readers understand your initial feelings and expectations before diving into the book.

Judge the Book by Its Cover (Just a Little)

Take a moment to talk about the book’s cover. Did it intrigue you? Did it hint at what to expect from the story or the author’s writing style? Sharing your thoughts on the cover can offer a unique perspective on how the book presents itself to potential readers.

Present Your Thesis

Now it’s time to introduce your thesis. This statement should be a concise and insightful summary of your opinion of the book. For example:

“Normal People” by Sally Rooney is a captivating portrayal of the complexities of human relationships, exploring themes of love, class, and self-discovery with exceptional depth and authenticity.

Ensure that your thesis is relevant to the points or quotes you plan to discuss throughout your review.

Incorporating these elements into your introduction will create a strong foundation for your book review. Your readers will be eager to learn more about your thoughts and insights on the book, setting the stage for a compelling and thought-provoking analysis.

How to Write a Book Review: Step 3 – Building Brilliant Body Paragraphs

You’ve planned your review and written an attention-grabbing introduction. Now it’s time for the main event: crafting the body paragraphs of your book review. In this step of “how to write a book review,” we’ll explore the art of constructing engaging and insightful body paragraphs that will keep your readers hooked.

Summarize Without Spoilers

Begin by summarizing a specific section of the book, not revealing any major plot twists or spoilers. Your goal is to give your readers a taste of the story without ruining surprises.

Support Your Viewpoint with Quotes

Next, choose three quotes from the book that support your viewpoint or opinion. These quotes should be relevant to the section you’re summarizing and help illustrate your thoughts on the book.

Analyze the Quotes

Write a summary of each quote in your own words, explaining how it made you feel or what it led you to think about the book or the author’s writing. This analysis should provide insight into your perspective and demonstrate your understanding of the text.

Structure Your Body Paragraphs

Dedicate one body paragraph to each quote, ensuring your writing is well-connected, coherent, and easy to understand.

For example:

• In  Jane Eyre , Charlotte Brontë writes, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me.” This powerful statement highlights Jane’s fierce independence and refusal to be trapped by societal expectations.
• In  Normal People , Sally Rooney explores the complexities of love and friendship when she writes, “It was culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys.” This quote reveals the author’s astute observations on the role of culture and class in shaping personal relationships.
• In  Wuthering Heights , Emily Brontë captures the tumultuous nature of love with the quote, “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” This poignant line emphasizes the deep, unbreakable bond between the story’s central characters.

By following these guidelines, you’ll create body paragraphs that are both captivating and insightful, enhancing your book review and providing your readers with a deeper understanding of the literary work. 

How to Write a Book Review: Step 4 – Crafting a Captivating Conclusion

You’ve navigated through planning, introductions, and body paragraphs with finesse. Now it’s time to wrap up your book review with a  conclusion that leaves a lasting impression . In this final step of “how to write a book review,” we’ll explore the art of writing a memorable and persuasive conclusion.

Summarize Your Analysis

Begin by summarizing the key points you’ve presented in the body paragraphs. This helps to remind your readers of the insights and arguments you’ve shared throughout your review.

Offer Your Final Conclusion

Next, provide a conclusion that reflects your overall feelings about the book. This is your chance to leave a lasting impression and persuade your readers to consider your perspective.

Address the Book’s Appeal

Now, answer the question: Is this book worth reading? Be clear about who would enjoy the book and who might not. Discuss the taste preferences and circumstances that make the book more appealing to some readers than others.

For example:  The Alchemist is a book that can enchant a young teen, but those who are already well-versed in classic literature might find it less engaging.

Be Subtle and Balanced

Avoid simply stating whether you “liked” or “disliked” the book. Instead, use nuanced language to convey your message. Highlight the pros and cons of reading the type of literature you’ve reviewed, offering a balanced perspective.

Bringing It All Together

By following these guidelines, you’ll craft a conclusion that leaves your readers with a clear understanding of your thoughts and opinions on the book. Your review will be a valuable resource for those considering whether to pick up the book, and your witty and insightful analysis will make your review a pleasure to read. So conquer the world of book reviews, one captivating conclusion at a time!

How to Write a Book Review: Step 5 – Rating the Book (Optional)

You’ve masterfully crafted your book review, from the introduction to the conclusion. But wait, there’s one more step you might consider before calling it a day: rating the book. In this optional step of “how to write a book review,” we’ll explore the benefits and methods of assigning a rating to the book you’ve reviewed.

Why Rate the Book?

Sometimes, when writing a professional book review, it may not be appropriate to state whether you liked or disliked the book. In such cases, assigning a rating can be an effective way to get your message across without explicitly sharing your personal opinion.

How to Rate the Book

There are various rating systems you can use to evaluate the book, such as:

• A star rating (e.g., 1 to 5 stars)
• A numerical score (e.g., 1 to 10)
• A letter grade (e.g., A+ to F)

Choose a rating system that best suits your style and the format of your review. Be consistent in your rating criteria, considering writing quality, character development, plot, and overall enjoyment.

Tips for Rating the Book

Here are some tips for rating the book effectively:

• Be honest: Your rating should reflect your true feelings about the book. Don’t inflate or deflate your rating based on external factors, such as the book’s popularity or the author’s reputation.
• Be fair:Consider the book’s merits and shortcomings when rating. Even if you didn’t enjoy the book, recognize its strengths and acknowledge them in your rating.
• Be clear: Explain the rationale behind your rating so your readers understand the factors that influenced your evaluation.

Wrapping Up

By including a rating in your book review, you provide your readers with an additional insight into your thoughts on the book. While this step is optional, it can be a valuable tool for conveying your message subtly yet effectively. So, rate those books confidently, adding a touch of wit and wisdom to your book reviews.

Additional Tips on How to Write a Book Review: A Guide

In this segment, we’ll explore additional tips on how to write a book review. Get ready to captivate your readers and make your review a memorable one!

Hook ’em with an Intriguing Introduction

Keep your introduction precise and to the point. Readers have the attention span of a goldfish these days, so don’t let them swim away in boredom. Start with a bang and keep them hooked!

Embrace the World of Fiction

When learning how to write a book review, remember that reviewing fiction is often more engaging and effective. If your professor hasn’t assigned you a specific book, dive into the realm of fiction and select a novel that piques your interest.

Opinionated with Gusto

Don’t shy away from adding your own opinion to your review. A good book review always features the writer’s viewpoint and constructive criticism. After all, your readers want to know what  you  think!

Express Your Love (or Lack Thereof)

If you adored the book, let your readers know! Use phrases like “I’ll definitely return to this book again” to convey your enthusiasm. Conversely, be honest but respectful even if the book wasn’t your cup of tea.

Templates and Examples and Expert Help: Your Trusty Sidekicks

Feeling lost? You can always get help from formats, book review examples or online  college paper writing service  platforms. These trusty sidekicks will help you navigate the world of book reviews with ease. 

Be a Champion for New Writers and Literature

Remember to uplift new writers and pieces of literature. If you want to suggest improvements, do so kindly and constructively. There’s no need to be mean about anyone’s books – we’re all in this literary adventure together!

Criticize with Clarity, Not Cruelty

When adding criticism to your review, be clear but not mean. Remember, there’s a fine line between constructive criticism and cruelty. Tread lightly and keep your reader’s feelings in mind.

Avoid the Comparison Trap

Resist the urge to compare one writer’s book with another. Every book holds its worth, and comparing them will only confuse your reader. Stick to discussing the book at hand, and let it shine in its own light.

Top 7 Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Writing a book review can be a delightful and rewarding experience, especially when you balance analysis, wit, and personal insights. However, some common mistakes can kill the brilliance of your review. 

In this section of “how to write a book review,” we’ll explore the top 7 blunders writers commit and how to steer clear of them, with a dash of  modernist literature  examples and tips for students writing book reviews as assignments.

Succumbing to the Lure of Plot Summaries

Mistake: Diving headfirst into a plot summary instead of dissecting the book’s themes, characters, and writing style.

Example: “The Bell Jar chronicles the life of a young woman who experiences a mental breakdown.”

How to Avoid: Delve into the book’s deeper aspects, such as its portrayal of mental health, societal expectations, and the author’s distinctive narrative voice. Offer thoughtful insights and reflections, making your review a treasure trove of analysis.

Unleashing the Spoiler Kraken

Mistake: Spilling major plot twists or the ending without providing a spoiler warning, effectively ruining the reading experience for potential readers.

Example: “In Metamorphosis, the protagonist’s transformation into a monstrous insect leads to…”

How to Avoid: Tread carefully when discussing significant plot developments, and consider using spoiler warnings. Focus on the impact of these plot points on the overall narrative, character growth, or thematic resonance.

Riding the Personal Bias Express

Mistake: Allowing personal bias to hijack the review without providing sufficient evidence or reasoning to support opinions.

Example: “I detest books about existential crises, so The Sun Also Rises was a snoozefest.”

How to Avoid: While personal opinions are valid, it’s crucial to back them up with specific examples from the book. Discuss aspects like writing style, character development, or pacing to support your evaluation and provide a more balanced perspective.

Wielding the Vague Language Saber

Mistake: Resorting to generic, vague language that fails to capture the nuances of the book and can come across as clichéd.

Example: “This book was mind-blowing. It’s a must-read for everyone.”

How to Avoid: Use precise and descriptive language to express your thoughts. Employ specific examples and quotations to highlight memorable scenes, the author’s unique writing style, or the impact of the book’s themes on readers.

Ignoring the Contextualization Compass

Mistake: Neglecting to provide context about the author, genre, or cultural relevance of the book, leaving readers without a proper frame of reference.

Example: “This book is dull and unoriginal.”

How to Avoid: Offer readers a broader understanding by discussing the author’s background, the genre conventions the book adheres to or subverts, and any societal or historical contexts that inform the narrative. This helps readers appreciate the book’s uniqueness and relevance.

Overindulging in Personal Preferences

Mistake: Letting personal preferences overshadow an objective assessment of the book’s merits.

Example: “I don’t like stream-of-consciousness writing, so this book is automatically bad.”

How to Avoid: Acknowledge personal preferences but strive to evaluate the book objectively. Focus on the book’s strengths and weaknesses, considering how well it achieves its goals within its genre or intended audience.

Forgetting the Target Audience Telescope

Mistake: Failing to mention the book’s target audience or who might enjoy it, leading to confusion for potential readers.

Example: “This book is great for everyone.”

How to Avoid: Contemplate the book’s intended audience, genre, and themes. Mention who might particularly enjoy the book based on these factors, whether it’s fans of a specific genre, readers interested in character-driven stories, or those seeking thought-provoking narratives.

By dodging these common pitfalls, writers can craft insightful, balanced, and engaging book reviews that help readers make informed decisions about their reading choices.

These tips are particularly beneficial for students writing book reviews as assignments, as they ensure a well-rounded and thoughtful analysis.!

Many students requested us to cover how to write a book review. This thorough guide is sure to help you. At Paperperk, professionals are dedicated to helping students find their balance. We understand the importance of good grades, so we offer the finest writing service , ensuring students stay ahead of the curve. So seek expert help because only Paperperk is your perfect solution!

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How to Write a Book Review: Awesome Guide

A book review allows students to illustrate the author's intentions of writing the piece, as well as create a criticism of the book — as a whole. In other words, form an opinion of the author's presented ideas. Check out this guide from EssayPro — book review writing service to learn how to write a book review successfully.

What Is a Book Review?

You may prosper, “what is a book review?”. Book reviews are commonly assigned students to allow them to show a clear understanding of the novel. And to check if the students have actually read the book. The essay format is highly important for your consideration, take a look at the book review format below.

Book reviews are assigned to allow students to present their own opinion regarding the author’s ideas included in the book or passage. They are a form of literary criticism that analyzes the author’s ideas, writing techniques, and quality. A book analysis is entirely opinion-based, in relevance to the book. They are good practice for those who wish to become editors, due to the fact, editing requires a lot of criticism.

Book Review Template

The book review format includes an introduction, body, and conclusion.

• Introduction
• Describe the book cover and title.
• Include any subtitles at this stage.
• Include the Author’s Name.
• Write a brief description of the novel.
• Briefly introduce the main points of the body in your book review.
• Avoid mentioning any opinions at this time.
• Use about 3 quotations from the author’s novel.
• Summarize the quotations in your own words.
• Mention your own point-of-view of the quotation.
• Remember to keep every point included in its own paragraph.
• In brief, summarize the quotations.
• In brief, summarize the explanations.
• Finish with a concluding sentence.
• This can include your final opinion of the book.
• Star-Rating (Optional).

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How to Write a Book Review: Step-By-Step

Writing a book review is something that can be done with every novel. Book reviews can apply to all novels, no matter the genre. Some genres may be harder than others. On the other hand, the book review format remains the same. Take a look at these step-by-step instructions from our professional writers to learn how to write a book review in-depth.

Step 1: Planning

Create an essay outline which includes all of the main points you wish to summarise in your book analysis. Include information about the characters, details of the plot, and some other important parts of your chosen novel. Reserve a body paragraph for each point you wish to talk about.

Consider these points before writing:

• What is the plot of the book? Understanding the plot enables you to write an effective review.
• Is the plot gripping? Does the plot make you want to continue reading the novel? Did you enjoy the plot? Does it manage to grab a reader’s attention?
• Are the writing techniques used by the author effective? Does the writer imply factors in-between the lines? What are they?
• Are the characters believable? Are the characters logical? Does the book make the characters are real while reading?
• Would you recommend the book to anyone? The most important thing: would you tell others to read this book? Is it good enough? Is it bad?
• What could be better? Keep in mind the quotes that could have been presented better. Criticize the writer.

Step 2: Introduction

Presumably, you have chosen your book. To begin, mention the book title and author’s name. Talk about the cover of the book. Write a thesis statement regarding the fictitious story or non-fictional novel. Which briefly describes the quoted material in the book review.

Step 3: Body

Choose a specific chapter or scenario to summarise. Include about 3 quotes in the body. Create summaries of each quote in your own words. It is also encouraged to include your own point-of-view and the way you interpret the quote. It is highly important to have one quote per paragraph.

Step 4: Conclusion

Write a summary of the summarised quotations and explanations, included in the body paragraphs. After doing so, finish book analysis with a concluding sentence to show the bigger picture of the book. Think to yourself, “Is it worth reading?”, and answer the question in black and white. However, write in-between the lines. Avoid stating “I like/dislike this book.”

Step 5: Rate the Book (Optional)

After writing a book review, you may want to include a rating. Including a star-rating provides further insight into the quality of the book, to your readers. Book reviews with star-ratings can be more effective, compared to those which don’t. Though, this is entirely optional.

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Dive into literary analysis with EssayPro . Our experts can help you craft insightful book reviews that delve deep into the themes, characters, and narratives of your chosen books. Enhance your understanding and appreciation of literature with us.

Writing Tips

Here is the list of tips for the book review:

• A long introduction can certainly lower one’s grade: keep the beginning short. Readers don’t like to read the long introduction for any essay style.
• It is advisable to write book reviews about fiction: it is not a must. Though, reviewing fiction can be far more effective than writing about a piece of nonfiction
• Avoid Comparing: avoid comparing your chosen novel with other books you have previously read. Doing so can be confusing for the reader.
• Opinion Matters: including your own point-of-view is something that is often encouraged when writing book reviews.
• Refer to Templates: a book review template can help a student get a clearer understanding of the required writing style.
• Don’t be Afraid to Criticize: usually, your own opinion isn’t required for academic papers below Ph.D. level. On the other hand, for book reviews, there’s an exception.
• Use Positivity: include a fair amount of positive comments and criticism.
• Review The Chosen Novel: avoid making things up. Review only what is presented in the chosen book.
• Enjoyed the book? If you loved reading the book, state it. Doing so makes your book analysis more personalized.

Writing a book review is something worth thinking about. Professors commonly assign this form of an assignment to students to enable them to express a grasp of a novel. Following the book review format is highly useful for beginners, as well as reading step-by-step instructions. Writing tips is also useful for people who are new to this essay type. If you need a book review or essay, ask our book report writing services ' write paper for me ' and we'll give you a hand asap!

We also recommend that everyone read the article about essay topics . It will help broaden your horizons in writing a book review as well as other papers.

Book Review Examples

Referring to a book review example is highly useful to those who wish to get a clearer understanding of how to review a book. Take a look at our examples written by our professional writers. Click on the button to open the book review examples and feel free to use them as a reference.

Book review

Kenneth Grahame’s ‘The Wind in the Willows’

Kenneth Grahame’s ‘The Wind in the Willows’ is a novel aimed at youngsters. The plot, itself, is not American humor, but that of Great Britain. In terms of sarcasm, and British-related jokes. The novel illustrates a fair mix of the relationships between the human-like animals, and wildlife. The narrative acts as an important milestone in post-Victorian children’s literature.

Book Review

Dr. John’s ‘Pollution’

Dr. John’s ‘Pollution’ consists of 3 major parts. The first part is all about the polluted ocean. The second being about the pollution of the sky. The third part is an in-depth study of how humans can resolve these issues. The book is a piece of non-fiction that focuses on modern-day pollution ordeals faced by both animals and humans on Planet Earth. It also focuses on climate change, being the result of the global pollution ordeal.

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How To Write A Book Review?

What to include in a book review, what is a book review, related articles.

Book Review Writing Examples

Examples: learn from the efforts of others.

Learning how to write strong reviews takes time and not a little effort. Reading the reviews others have done can help you get a feel for the flow and flavor of reviews.

If I Never Forever Endeavor Review by Hayden, age 4, Southeast Michigan Mensa

This book was about a bird who didn't yet know how to fly.

The bird has to decide if it will try to fly, but it was not sure if it wants to. The bird thought, "If I never forever endeavor" then I won't ever learn. On one wing, he worries he might fail and on the other wing he thinks of how he may succeed. He worries that if he tries, he may get lost in the world. That makes him want to stay in his nest where he's safe.

I think this book would help other children to learn that trying new things can be scary, but sometimes when we try, we can find things that make us happy too. And this book will help others know that mistakes are okay and part of learning.

My favorite part is that the bird tried and learned that she could fly. I also liked that I read this book because it gave me a chance to talk to mom about making mistakes and how I don't like making them. Then I learned they are good and part of learning.

Boys and girls who are 3 to 8 years old would like this book because it teaches about trying a new thing and how it's important to get past being scared so you can learn new things.

I give the book 5 stars since I think it's important for other children to learn about courage.

Flesh & Blood So Cheap Review by Umar B., age 8, Central New Jersy Mensa

I liked this book. People who are interested in national disasters and US history as well as immigration will most probably be interested in reading this book.

Readers can gain knowledge of what it was like to work in New York City in the early 1900s. One of the things that was especially interesting was that there were no safety laws at work. Also, there was a big contrast between the rich and the poor. Some people may not like this book because it is very depressing, but it is an important event in history to remember.

This book was very well written. It has black and white photos along with descriptions of the photos. These photos give us a better idea of what people's lives were like. This book is suitable for 9-20 year olds.

I give this book 5 stars.

Galaxy Zach: Journey to Juno Review by Young Mensan Connor C., age 6, Boston Mensa

Journey To Juno is the second book of the Galaxy Zack series. It is just as good as the first one. It's awesome!

Zack joins the Sprockets Academy Explorers Club at school. They fly on a special trip to Juno, a new planet no one has ever visited. Zack gets paired up with Seth, the class bully, and that's dreadful but Zack is excited when he finds a huge galaxy gemmite. A gemmite that large had not been found in 100 years! Kids will love this book!

Boys and girls will both like it. It's an easy chapter book with pictures on every page. I love the illustrations. I think ages 6-8 would like this but younger kids would like the story being read to them.

My favorite parts are the galactic blast game (it is similar to baseball except there are robots playing), recess at Zack's school where everything is 3-D holographic images, the rainbow river in a crystal cave on Juno, and the galaxy gemmite that Zack finds on Juno. I also loved when a life-size holographic image of his Earth friend appears in Zack's room because he calls him on a hyperphone. I give this book one hundred stars! There is a "to be continued" at the end so you have to read the next book see what's in store. I can't wait to find out what happens!!!

I Capture the Castle Review by Lauren W., age 17, Mensa in Georgia

Dodie Smith's novel I Capture the Castle is a journey through the mind of a young writer as she attempts to chronicle her daily life. Seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain has recently learned to speed-write, and she decides to work on her writing skills by describing the actions and conversations of those around her.

Cassandra lives in a fourteenth-century English castle with an interesting cast of characters: her beautiful older sister, Rose; her rather unsociable author father and his second wife, artist-model Topaz; Stephen, the garden boy; a cat and a bull terrier; and sometimes her brother Thomas when he is home from school. One fateful day they make the acquaintance of the Cotton family, including the two sons, and a web of tangled relationships ensues.

While I definitely recommend this book to other readers, I would recommend it to older teenagers, mainly because it will resonate better with them. The writing is tame enough that younger teens could also read it, but most of the characters are adults or on the verge of adulthood. Older readers would take the most from it since they can not only relate, but they may also better pick up on and appreciate Cassandra's sometimes subtle humor.

Over the course of the novel, Cassandra undergoes a definite transformation from child to mature young adult, even though it's only over the course of several months. I love that I could see into her mindset and read exactly what she was feeling when she thought out situations. Her thoughts flowed well and moved the book along very quickly.

Cassandra's narrative voice is wonderful. She is serious at times, but also very witty, which makes for an engaging read. It feels absolutely real, as though I'm reading someone's actual journal. Sometimes I forget that I am reading a story and not a real-life account. Her emotions and the dialogue are so genuine, and they are spot-on for a seventeen-year-old girl in her situation.

Cassandra has many wonderful insights on life, on topics ranging from writing to faith to matters of the heart. I personally have had some of the same thoughts as Cassandra, except Ms. Smith was able to put them into words.

Capture the Castle should be essential reading for aspiring writers, those looking for historical fiction or romance, or anyone who loves reading amazing classic books. Dodie Smith is an exceptional writer, and I Capture the Castle is a book that will never become obsolete.

Frankenstein's Cat Review by Zander H., age 12, Mid-America Mensa

I appreciated Frankenstein's Cat for its fascinating explanation about the often baffling subject of bioengineering and its sister sciences. Emily Anthes explains the many sides of today's modern technology, such as gene modification, cloning, pharmaceutical products (from the farm), prosthesis, animal tag and tracking and gene cryogenics. This book provides a well-rounded summary of these complicated sciences without being boring or simply factual. Her real world examples take us on a journey from the farm, to the pet store and then from the pharmacy to the frozen arc.

Have you ever wondered if the neighborhood cat is spying on you? Read about Operation Acoustic Kitty and find out if this feline fantasy fiction or fact. Do you think bugs are creepy? What about a zombified cyborg beetle? Is Fido so special that you want two of him? Money can buy you an almost exact copy of your pooch BUT don't expect the same personality. Emily Anthes makes you crave more information. She makes you want to know the future of Earth's flora and fauna, as well as humanity itself.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who desires a guide to the future of biological science and technology. Frankenstein's Cat is best read by the light of a glow-in-the-dark fish, while cuddling your favorite cloned dog and drinking a glass of genetically modified milk.

About Marsupials Review by Connor C., age 6, Boston Mensa

About Marsupials is the title so the book is about...marsupials, of course. It's non-fiction. I really think everyone would like the book. I think someone who likes animals would especially like to read it.

The glossary of facts in the back of About Marsupials is the most useful part. I thought the most interesting parts were that some marsupials have their pouch at their back legs and one marsupial, the Yellow-footed Rock Wallaby, is very small but can jump 13 feet wide!

Kids in the 4-8 age range would like this book. Even though it's not a story book, 4 year olds would like the few words on each page and they would love the beautiful pictures. But older kids would like it because of all the facts in the back of the book. There's a lot of information for each animal. I think boys and girls (and parents) would enjoy reading it. This book is very interesting. I give it 4 stars.

Mapping the World Review by Umar A., age 10, Central New Jersey Mensa

Every day, people around the world use maps. Whether it is an airplane pilot or businessman, housewife or museum group, maps have always and will continue to provide useful information for all.

Mapping the World talks about the uses of maps, as well as how to differentiate between the type of map projection and type of map.

In this series, we travel to the past and learn about historical mapmakers, from Claudius Ptolemy (who stated the idea that the Earth is at the center of the universe) to Gerardus Mercator (who created one of the most widely used map projections) and more. This series goes into tremendous detail on the cartographer's life and maps. We then journey to the present era to learn about map projections and the diverse types of maps used today. You might ask, "What is the difference between the two? They sound the same to me." No map projection is perfect, because you cannot really flatten a sphere into a rectangle. An uncolored projection could be used in many ways. We could use it for population concentration, highways, land elevation, and so many other things!

For example, we could make a topographic map of the U.S., which shows land elevation. We could make it a colorful map that shows the amount of pollution in different areas, or it could be a population map, or it could even be a map that shows the 50 states, their capitals and borders! Our last step in this amazing excursion is the near future, where we see some hypothetical solutions as to what maps will be used for. Currently, we are working on better virtual map technology.

Now, scientists have been able to put maps on phones. Back in the early 1900s, people had to lug a lot of maps around to find your way from place to place, or just keep asking for directions. Now, all the information is on a phone or global positioning system (GPS). It is amazing how much maps have changed technology and the world in this century.

The Mapping the World 8-book set goes into amazing levels of detail. It is a long read, but it gives an immense range and amount of information that you would not find in any other book or series on maps. The flowing way the chapters and books are organized makes it easy to link passages from different books in this series together. Mapping the World is a treasure box, filled with the seeds of cartography. Collect and plant them, and you soon will have the fruits of cartography, beneficial to those who want to be cartographers. Use this series to the utmost, then the fruits of mapping will be sweet for all who endeavor to succeed in cartography.

This series of lessons was designed to meet the needs of gifted children for extension beyond the standard curriculum with the greatest ease of use for the educator. The lessons may be given to the students for individual self-guided work, or they may be taught in a classroom or a home-school setting. Assessment strategies and rubrics are included at the end of each section. The rubrics often include a column for "scholar points," which are invitations for students to extend their efforts beyond that which is required, incorporating creativity or higher level technical skills.

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The 10 Best Book Reviews of 2020

Adam morgan picks parul sehgal on raven leilani, merve emre on lewis carroll, and more.

The pandemic and the birth of my second daughter prevented me from reading most of the books I wanted to in 2020. But I was able to read vicariously  through book critics, whose writing was a true source of comfort and escape for me this year. I’ve long told my students that criticism is literature—a genre of nonfiction that can and should be as insightful, experimental, and compelling as the art it grapples with—and the following critics have beautifully proven my point. The word “best” is always a misnomer, but these are my personal favorite book reviews of 2020.

Nate Marshall on Barack Obama’s A Promised Land ( Chicago Tribune )

A book review rarely leads to a segment on The 11th Hour with Brian Williams , but that’s what happened to Nate Marshall last month. I love how he combines a traditional review with a personal essay—a hybrid form that has become my favorite subgenre of criticism.

“The presidential memoir so often falls flat because it works against the strengths of the memoir form. Rather than take a slice of one’s life to lay bare and come to a revelation about the self or the world, the presidential memoir seeks to take the sum of a life to defend one’s actions. These sorts of memoirs are an attempt maybe not to rewrite history, but to situate history in the most rosy frame. It is by nature defensive and in this book, we see Obama’s primary defensive tool, his prodigious mind and proclivity toward over-considering every detail.”

Merve Emre on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ( The Point )

I’m a huge fan of writing about books that weren’t just published in the last 10 seconds. And speaking of that hybrid form above, Merve Emre is one of its finest practitioners. This piece made me laugh out loud and changed the way I think about Lewis Carroll.

“I lie awake at night and concentrate on Alice,  on why my children have fixated on this book at this particular moment. Part of it must be that I have told them it ‘takes place’ in Oxford, and now Oxford—or more specifically, the college whose grounds grow into our garden—marks the physical limits of their world. Now that we can no longer move about freely, no longer go to new places to see new things, we are trying to find ways to estrange the places and objects that are already familiar to us.”

Parul Sehgal on Raven Leilani’s Luster ( The New York Times Book Review )

Once again, Sehgal remains the best lede writer in the business. I challenge you to read the opening of any  Sehgal review and stop there.

“You may know of the hemline theory—the idea that skirt lengths fluctuate with the stock market, rising in boom times and growing longer in recessions. Perhaps publishing has a parallel; call it the blurb theory. The more strained our circumstances, the more manic the publicity machine, the more breathless and orotund the advance praise. Blurbers (and critics) speak with a reverent quiver of this moment, anointing every other book its guide, every second writer its essential voice.”

Constance Grady on Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ( Vox )

Restoring the legacies of ill-forgotten books is one of our duties as critics. Grady’s take on “the least famous sister in a family of celebrated geniuses” makes a good case for Wildfell Hall’ s place alongside Wuthering Heights  and Jane Eyre  in the Romantic canon.

“[T]he heart of this book is a portrait of a woman surviving and flourishing after abuse, and in that, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall feels unnervingly modern. It is fresh, shocking, and wholly new today, 200 years after the birth of its author.”

Ismail Muhammad on Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley ( The Atlantic )

Muhammad is a philosophical critic, so it’s always fun to see him tackle a book with big ideas. Here, he makes an enlightened connection between Wiener’s Silicon Valley memoir and Michael Lewis’s 1989 Wall Street exposé, Liar’s Poker.

“Like Lewis, Wiener found ‘a way out of unhappiness’ by writing her own gimlet-eyed generational portrait that doubles as a cautionary tale of systemic dysfunction. But if her chronicle acquires anything like the must-read status that Lewis’s antic tale of a Princeton art-history major’s stint at Salomon Brothers did, it will be for a different reason. For all her caustic insight and droll portraiture, Wiener is on an earnest quest likely to resonate with a public that has been sleepwalking through tech’s gradual reshaping of society.”

Hermione Hoby on Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs ( 4 Columns )

Hoby’s thousand-word review is a great example of a critic reading beyond the book to place it in context.

“When Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs  was first published in 2008, the then-governor of Tokyo, the ultraconservative Shintaro Ishihara, deemed the novel ‘unpleasant and intolerable.’ I wonder what he objected to? Perhaps he wasn’t into a scene in which the narrator, a struggling writer called Natsuko, pushes a few fingers into her vagina in a spirit of dejected exploration: ‘I . . . tried being rough and being gentle. Nothing worked.’”

Taylor Moore on C Pam Zhang’s How Much Of These Hills Is Gold ( The A.V. Club )

Describing Zhang’s wildly imaginative debut novel is hard, but Moore manages to convey the book’s shape and texture in less than 800 words, along with some critical analysis.

“Despite some characteristics endemic to Wild West narratives (buzzards circling prey, saloons filled with seedy strangers), the world of How Much Of These Hills Is Gold feels wholly original, and Zhang imbues its wide expanse with magical realism. According to local lore, tigers lurk in the shadows, despite having died out ‘decades ago’ with the buffalo. There also exists a profound sense of loss for an exploited land, ‘stripped of its gold, its rivers, its buffalo, its Indians, its tigers, its jackals, its birds and its green and its living.’”

Grace Ebert on Paul Christman’s Midwest Futures ( Chicago Review of Books )

I love how Ebert brings her lived experience as a Midwesterner into this review of Christman’s essay collection. (Disclosure: I founded the Chicago Review of Books five years ago, but handed over the keys in July 2019.)

“I have a deep and genuine love for Wisconsin, for rural supper clubs that always offer a choice between chicken soup or an iceberg lettuce salad, and for driving back, country roads that seemingly are endless. This love, though, is conflicting. How can I sing along to Waylon Jennings, Tanya Tucker, and Merle Haggard knowing that my current political views are in complete opposition to the lyrics I croon with a twang in my voice?”

Michael Schaub on Bryan Washington’s Memorial ( NPR )

How do you review a book you fall in love with? It’s one of the most challenging assignments a critic can tackle. But Schaub is a pro; he falls in love with a few books every year.

“Washington is an enormously gifted author, and his writing—spare, unadorned, but beautiful—reads like the work of a writer who’s been working for decades, not one who has yet to turn 30. Just like Lot, Memorial  is a quietly stunning book, a masterpiece that asks us to reflect on what we owe to the people who enter our lives.”

Mesha Maren on Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season ( Southern Review of Books )

Maren opens with an irresistible comparison between Melchor’s irreverent novel and medieval surrealist art. (Another Disclosure: I founded the Southern Review of Books in early 2020.)

“Have you ever wondered what internal monologue might accompany the characters in a Hieronymus Bosch painting? What are the couple copulating upside down in the middle of that pond thinking? Or the man with flowers sprouting from his ass? Or the poor fellow being killed by a fire-breathing creature which is itself impaled upon a knife? I would venture to guess that their voices would sound something like the writing of Mexican novelist Fernanda Melchor.”

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How to read a story, common sense media reviewers.

Sweet, engaging steps for budding readers.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

Thoughtful advice on how to approach a book, makin

Reading is not a solo, passive activity; it’

The young boy patiently searches for a friend to r

Storybook illustrations include a man with a sword

Parents need to know that How to Read a Story offers warm encouragement to budding readers. Kate Messner, author of the delightful Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt , shows there’s much more to enjoying a book than decoding the words and following the plot. Her gentle book prods kids to…

Educational Value

Thoughtful advice on how to approach a book, making predictions, reflecting on what you’ve read, reading aloud with passion and excitement, and handling challenging words.

Positive Messages

Reading is not a solo, passive activity; it’s an opportunity to enjoy time with a friend or loved one, to exercise your imagination, to challenge yourself to persevere. Helpful tips, and a useful reference during storytime.

Positive Role Models

The young boy patiently searches for a friend to read with; his mom appears too busy, his young sister uses books for teething, and a friend is already absorbed in a story. He cuddles up with his dog, and by book's end he's surrounded by appreciative listeners drawn in by his vivid storytelling.

Violence & Scariness

Storybook illustrations include a man with a sword, a bow-wielding princess, a dragon torching a city, a dragon preparing to eat a sandwich stuffed with a princess and a horse.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that How to Read a Story offers warm encouragement to budding readers. Kate Messner , author of the delightful Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt , shows there’s much more to enjoying a book than decoding the words and following the plot. Her gentle book prods kids to snuggle up and deeply engage with what they’re reading.

Where to Read

Community reviews.

• Parents say

There aren't any parent reviews yet. Be the first to review this title.

What's the Story?

In HOW TO READ A STORY, a young boy begins with Step 1: Find a story. Then he selects a snuggly reading buddy (his dog) and a cozy reading spot. Step by step, he guides readers through the joys of reading a book: contemplating the cover and guessing what it might be about, giving the characters life with different voices, working through unfamiliar words, and finally getting to the end ... at which point you can, if you like, go back to the beginning and start again.

Is It Any Good?

A how-to book on reading a book might seem odd. But families will quickly realize that it’s actually a terrific approach to helping children develop a lifelong love of reading. Author Kate Messner offers easy-to-follow advice, such as, "When you get to the exciting parts, make your voice sound exciting, too," and sample excerpts kids can use for practice. She builds suspense, just as if you were reading an adventure story: "When you and your buddy can’t stand it a second longer," she says, “turn the page to read how things work out."

Bright ink-and-watercolor illustrations by Mark Siegel ( Boogie Knights ) combine an old-fashioned appeal with a modern vibrancy. This is both a helpful playbook and an inspiring pep talk for young readers just getting started -- and grown-up readers, as well.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about what makes a story fun to read. What are you favorite types of stories?

Practice reading to each other. Family members can take turns reading the same story and compare how they interpret the characters' voices. You could even try play-acting a favorite.

Extend the book by talking about creating a mental picture of what's happening in a story. Choose a book with fewer pictures and pause to talk about what you're picturing in your mind.

Book Details

• Author : Kate Messner
• Illustrator : Mark Siegel
• Genre : For Beginning Readers
• Topics : Adventures , Book Characters , Great Boy Role Models
• Book type : Fiction
• Publisher : Chronicle Books
• Publication date : May 5, 2015
• Publisher's recommended age(s) : 5 - 8
• Number of pages : 32
• Available on : Hardback, iBooks, Kindle
• Last updated : July 12, 2017

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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You Read to Me, I'll Read to You: Very Short Fairy Tales to Read Together

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How to Write a Book Review: The Ultimate Guide

WHAT IS A BOOK REVIEW?

Traditionally, book reviews are evaluations of a recently published book in any genre. Usually, around the 500 to 700-word mark, they briefly describe a text’s main elements while appraising the work’s strengths and weaknesses. Published book reviews can appear in newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. They provide the reader with an overview of the book itself and indicate whether or not the reviewer would recommend the book to the reader.

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF A BOOK REVIEW?

There was a time when book reviews were a regular appearance in every quality newspaper and many periodicals. They were essential elements in whether or not a book would sell well. A review from a heavyweight critic could often be the deciding factor in whether a book became a bestseller or a damp squib. In the last few decades, however, the book review’s influence has waned considerably, with many potential book buyers preferring to consult customer reviews on Amazon, or sites like Goodreads, before buying. As a result, book review’s appearance in newspapers, journals, and digital media has become less frequent.

WHY BOTHER TEACHING STUDENTS TO WRITE BOOK REVIEWS AT ALL?

Even in the heyday of the book review’s influence, few students who learned the craft of writing a book review became literary critics! The real value of crafting a well-written book review for a student does not lie in their ability to impact book sales. Understanding how to produce a well-written book review helps students to:

●     Engage critically with a text

●     Critically evaluate a text

●     Respond personally to a range of different writing genres

●     Improve their own reading, writing, and thinking skills.

Not to Be Confused with a Book Report!

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A BOOK REVIEW AND A BOOK REPORT?

While the terms are often used interchangeably, there are clear differences in both the purpose and the format of the two genres. Generally speaking, book reports aim to give a more detailed outline of what occurs in a book. A book report on a work of fiction will tend to give a comprehensive account of the characters, major plot lines, and themes in the book. Book reports are usually written around the K-12 age range, while book reviews tend not to be undertaken by those at the younger end of this age range due to the need for the higher-level critical skills required in writing them. At their highest expression, book reviews are written at the college level and by professional critics.

Learn how to write a book review step by step with our complete guide for students and teachers by familiarizing yourself with the structure and features.

BOOK REVIEW STRUCTURE

ANALYZE Evaluate the book with a critical mind.

THOROUGHNESS The whole is greater than the sum of all its parts. Review the book as a WHOLE.

COMPARE Where appropriate compare to similar texts and genres.

THUMBS UP OR DOWN? You are going to have to inevitably recommend or reject this book to potential readers.

BE CONSISTENT Take a stance and stick with it throughout your review.

FEATURES OF A BOOK REVIEW

PAST TENSE You are writing about a book you have already read.

EMOTIVE LANGUAGE Whatever your stance or opinion be passionate about it. Your audience will thank you for it.

VOICE Both active and passive voice are used in recounts.

A COMPLETE UNIT ON REVIEW AND ANALYSIS OF TEXTS

⭐ Make  MOVIES A MEANINGFUL PART OF YOUR CURRICULUM  with this engaging collection of tasks and tools your students will love. ⭐ All the hard work is done for you with  NO PREPARATION REQUIRED.

This collection of  21 INDEPENDENT TASKS  and  GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS  takes students beyond the hype, special effects and trailers to look at visual literacy from several perspectives offering DEEP LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES by watching a  SERIES, DOCUMENTARY, FILM, and even  VIDEO GAMES.

ELEMENTS OF A BOOK REVIEW

As with any of the writing genres we teach our students, a book review can be helpfully explained in terms of criteria. While there is much to the ‘art’ of writing, there is also, thankfully, a lot of the nuts and bolts that can be listed too. Have students consider the following elements before writing:

●     Title: Often, the title of the book review will correspond to the title of the text itself, but there may also be some examination of the title’s relevance. How does it fit into the purpose of the work as a whole? Does it convey a message or reveal larger themes explored within the work?

●     Author: Within the book review, there may be some discussion of who the author is and what they have written before, especially if it relates to the current work being reviewed. There may be some mention of the author’s style and what they are best known for. If the author has received any awards or prizes, this may also be mentioned within the body of the review.

●     Genre: A book review will identify the genre that the book belongs to, whether fiction or nonfiction, poetry, romance, science-fiction, history etc. The genre will likely tie in, too with who the intended audience for the book is and what the overall purpose of the work is.

●     Book Jacket / Cover: Often, a book’s cover will contain artwork that is worthy of comment. It may contain interesting details related to the text that contribute to, or detract from, the work as a whole.

●     Structure: The book’s structure will often be heavily informed by its genre. Have students examine how the book is organized before writing their review. Does it contain a preface from a guest editor, for example? Is it written in sections or chapters? Does it have a table of contents, index, glossary etc.? While all these details may not make it into the review itself, looking at how the book is structured may reveal some interesting aspects.

●     Publisher and Price: A book review will usually contain details of who publishes the book and its cost. A review will often provide details of where the book is available too.

BOOK REVIEW KEY ELEMENTS

As students read and engage with the work they will review, they will develop a sense of the shape their review will take. This will begin with the summary. Encourage students to take notes during the reading of the work that will help them in writing the summary that will form an essential part of their review. Aspects of the book they may wish to take notes on in a work of fiction may include:

●     Characters: Who are the main characters? What are their motivations? Are they convincingly drawn? Or are they empathetic characters?

●     Themes: What are the main themes of the work? Are there recurring motifs in the work? Is the exploration of the themes deep or surface only?

●     Style: What are the key aspects of the writer’s style? How does it fit into the wider literary world?

●     Plot: What is the story’s main catalyst? What happens in the rising action? What are the story’s subplots? 

A book review will generally begin with a short summary of the work itself. However, it is important not to give too much away, remind students – no spoilers, please! For nonfiction works, this may be a summary of the main arguments of the work, again, without giving too much detail away. In a work of fiction, a book review will often summarise up to the rising action of the piece without going beyond to reveal too much!

The summary should also provide some orientation for the reader. Given the nature of the purpose of a review, it is important that students’ consider their intended audience in the writing of their review. Readers will most likely not have read the book in question and will require some orientation. This is often achieved through introductions to the main characters, themes, primary arguments etc. This will help the reader to gauge whether or not the book is of interest to them.

Once your student has summarized the work, it is time to ‘review’ in earnest. At this point, the student should begin to detail their own opinion of the book. To do this well they should:

i. Make It Personal

Often when teaching essay writing we will talk to our students about the importance of climbing up and down the ladder of abstraction. Just as it is helpful to explore large, more abstract concepts in an essay by bringing it down to Earth, in a book review, it is important that students can relate the characters, themes, ideas etc to their own lives.

Book reviews are meant to be subjective. They are opinion pieces, and opinions grow out of our experiences of life. Encourage students to link the work they are writing about to their own personal life within the body of the review. By making this personal connection to the work, students contextualize their opinions for the readers and help them to understand whether the book will be of interest to them or not in the process.

ii. Make It Universal

Just as it is important to climb down the ladder of abstraction to show how the work relates to individual life, it is important to climb upwards on the ladder too. Students should endeavor to show how the ideas explored in the book relate to the wider world. The may be in the form of the universality of the underlying themes in a work of fiction or, for example, the international implications for arguments expressed in a work of nonfiction.

iii. Support Opinions with Evidence

A book review is a subjective piece of writing by its very nature. However, just because it is subjective does not mean that opinions do not need to be justified. Make sure students understand how to back up their opinions with various forms of evidence, for example, quotations, statistics, and the use of primary and secondary sources.

EDIT AND REVISE YOUR BOOK REVIEW

As with any writing genre, encourage students to polish things up with review and revision at the end. Encourage them to proofread and check for accurate spelling throughout, with particular attention to the author’s name, character names, publisher etc. 

It is good practice too for students to double-check their use of evidence. Are statements supported? Are the statistics used correctly? Are the quotations from the text accurate? Mistakes such as these uncorrected can do great damage to the value of a book review as they can undermine the reader’s confidence in the writer’s judgement.

The discipline of writing book reviews offers students opportunities to develop their writing skills and exercise their critical faculties. Book reviews can be valuable standalone activities or serve as a part of a series of activities engaging with a central text. They can also serve as an effective springboard into later discussion work based on the ideas and issues explored in a particular book. Though the book review does not hold the sway it once did in the mind’s of the reading public, it still serves as an effective teaching tool in our classrooms today.

Teaching Resources

Use our resources and tools to improve your student’s writing skills through proven teaching strategies.

BOOK REVIEW GRAPHIC ORGANIZER (TEMPLATE)

101 DIGITAL & PRINT GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS FOR ALL CURRICULUM AREAS

Introduce your students to 21st-century learning with this GROWING BUNDLE OF 101 EDITABLE & PRINTABLE GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS. ✌ NO PREP REQUIRED!!! ✌ Go paperless, and let your students express their knowledge and creativity through the power of technology and collaboration inside and outside the classroom with ease.

Whilst you don’t have to have a 1:1 or BYOD classroom to benefit from this bundle, it has been purpose-built to deliver through platforms such as ✔ GOOGLE CLASSROOM, ✔ OFFICE 365, ✔ or any CLOUD-BASED LEARNING PLATFORM.

Book and Movie review writing examples (Student Writing Samples)

Below are a collection of student writing samples of book reviews.  Click on the image to enlarge and explore them in greater detail.  Please take a moment to both read the movie or book review in detail but also the teacher and student guides which highlight some of the key elements of writing a text review

Please understand these student writing samples are not intended to be perfect examples for each age or grade level but a piece of writing for students and teachers to explore together to critically analyze to improve student writing skills and deepen their understanding of book review writing.

We would recommend reading the example either a year above and below, as well as the grade you are currently working with to gain a broader appreciation of this text type .

BOOK REVIEW VIDEO TUTORIALS

OTHER GREAT ARTICLES RELATED TO BOOK REVIEWS

Transactional Writing

How to write a text response

How to Write a Compare and Contrast Essay

How to Write Excellent Expository Essays

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A.J. Finn had a spectacular rise and fall. Now he has a new novel.

Five years after a damning new yorker profile, the author of the blockbuster novel ‘the woman in the window’ returns with ‘end of story’.

If you’ve picked up a thriller in the past five years, you’ve probably seen A.J. Finn’s name on it. But not necessarily on the cover.

Since the publication of his blockbuster novel “ The Woman in the Window ” in 2018, Finn has become something of a serial blurber, adorning dozens of novels with his praise. “Loved every word,” he said of Richard Osman’s “The Thursday Murder Club.” He declared Alex Michaelides’s “The Silent Patient” “that rarest of beasts: the perfect thriller.” Of Nita Prose’s “ The Mystery Guest ” he gushed, “Wise and winning and altogether wondrous,” adding: “I was nearly hugging myself as I turned the pages of this splendid novel.”

Meanwhile, Finn’s next novel — the second part of the two-book, $2 million deal he made with William Morrow in 2016 — remained a work in progress. Expected to be published in 2020, the book, “ End of Story ,” finally lands in stores on Tuesday.

The question is: Will it be enough to save Finn’s reputation? Before answering, I need to explain the unexpected plot twist that preceded its publication.

“The Woman in the Window” was a smash hit that put its witty, camera-ready author on the cusp of celebrityhood. The book — a domestic suspense tale about an agoraphobic child psychologist who believes she has witnessed a murder — debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list and went on to sell millions of copies worldwide. Stephen King called it “delightful and chilling”; Louise Penny declared it a “tour de force.” Translated into more than 40 languages, the novel was made into a film with Amy Adams, Gary Oldman and Julianne Moore. It even inspired a spoof, “The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window,” a Netflix series starring Kristen Bell.

But something funny happened on the way to fame. In early 2019, an exposé in the New Yorker portrayed Finn, whose real name is Dan Mallory, as the kind of unreliable narrator you might find in an A.J. Finn novel. The article detailed a trail of less-than-true stories Mallory had told about himself over the years: that he had a doctorate from Oxford; that his mother had died of cancer; that he had a brain tumor; that his brother had died by suicide. Colleagues reported that during his decade as a book editor, Mallory used these struggles to elicit sympathy, further his career and vanish when things got awkward. At one point, when Mallory was working in New York at Morrow, he stopped coming into the office, a disappearance that was explained away by a series of emails from a mysterious sender claiming to be Mallory’s now-alive brother but sounding a lot like Mallory himself.

If the author of ‘Woman in the Window’ is a serial liar, can we still love his book?

Mallory eventually confessed to his fibs, sort of. Through a publicist’s statement to the New Yorker, he said that he had “severe bipolar II disorder,” which caused “delusional thoughts” and “memory problems.” Mallory’s psychiatrist told the magazine that the writer’s experience with his mother’s (real but not fatal) bout with breast cancer had contributed to his expressing “‘somatic complaints, fears, and preoccupations,’ including about cancer.” Mallory said he was “utterly terrified of what people would think of me if they knew” about his mental health problems. “Dissembling seemed the easier path. … I’m sorry to have taken, or be seen to have taken, advantage of anyone else’s goodwill.” Reaction to this expression of regret-cum-justification was mixed; some, including a letter-writer to the New Yorker with bipolar disorder , criticized the author for further stigmatizing the disease: “It was upsetting. … Mental illness does not make you a liar, a scammer, or a cheat.”

Given this heavy baggage, to consider “End of Story” on its own merits poses a challenge. Let’s try.

As a commercial suspense novel, “The Woman in the Window” — at least for the first 200 pages — is quite entertaining, if derivative for anyone who’s seen “Rear Window,” or any Hitchcock, for that matter. (Mallory also defended himself against accusations that he had plagiarized plot points of Sarah A. Denzil’s “Saving April,” with he and his agent saying Mallory’s book had been plotted before Denzil wrote her book, which Mallory never read.) Told in the present tense, in short sentences and chapters, the tale speeds along. At its center is the distraught, pill-popping child psychiatrist Anna Fox, who is not as she appears.

In the heyday of thrillers with unreliable narrators — see “The Girl on the Train” and “Gone Girl” — Anna was a master dupe. She loved her merlot (a detail mocked to brilliant comic effect in the Kristen Bell parody) and staring out the window (like Grace Kelly but in a ragged bathrobe) at her neighbors, who were up to something but not what she thought.

What the plot lacks in plausibility, it makes up for in the zippy immediacy of the writing, even when it patters on too long, collecting a few odd descriptions along the way, as when a phone rings: “My head swivels, almost back to front, like an owl, and the camera drops to my lap. The sound is behind me, but my phone is in my hand. It’s the landline. … Another ring. And another. I shrivel against the glass, wilt there in the cold. I imagine the rooms of my house, one by one, throbbing with that noise.” Still, Anna is a compelling character (“I feel as though I’m falling through my own mind”), and readers rooted for her even if we knew she probably wasn’t telling the truth.

The 12 best thrillers of 2023

“End of Story” is written in the same staccato style. The first page ends: “A breath. Then that scream. They’ve found her.”

But things get leaden right away. The setup is complicated — as one character says, “There’s too much time to keep track of.” Nicky Hunter, the book’s protagonist, is a young journalist hired by a dying mystery writer named Sebastian Trapp to write his biography (the pair met as pen pals). Trapp invites Nicky to live at his mansion in San Francisco while she writes. Trapp, called “the champion deceiver” (wink, wink) by critics, writes novels featuring a “gentleman English sleuth” named Simon St. John. Trapp is also a murder suspect. Years before, his first wife, Hope, and his son Cole disappeared and are presumed dead. How Trapp figures into this puzzle is one of the questions Nicky hopes to resolve while researching her book.

Sleeping in the bedroom once occupied by young Cole, Nicky gets to know various members of the Trapp family: Sebastian’s bitter daughter Madeleine (“her hair is careless and blond, her shoulders round”), his beautiful second wife (“fortysomething, lavish lashes and Cupid’s-bow lips”), his handsome, troubled nephew (“six feet of built-to-last, muscles bulging within his sleeves”). All of them think and speak in a similar way — droll, coy, urbane — which is to say with the same studied cleverness that Mallory deploys in interviews. Even Sebastian’s dog, Watson, is a French bulldog, the breed favored by Mallory. And then there’s this comment by a bit character late in the book: “Moral indignation is envy with a halo.” Could that be Finn throwing shade on his critics?

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The plot drags on — the phrase “the plot thickens” appears without obvious irony. At times the book reads like a dime-store romance novel: “Up and across. The man is vast, an eclipse in coat and tie, pink linen shirt taut around his belly, like the skin of some unwholesome fruit. Black eyes lurking beneath zigzag brows. Face the color of rare beef.” (Thank you, but I think I’ll have the chicken.) Elsewhere, you can almost see Finn consulting a thesaurus. “You absquatulated,” Nicky says to Madeleine, whose desk is “a dainty escritoire that chafes her thighs.” At one point, books are “rutilant in the light.” And the ending, which I shall not spoil, raises more questions than it answers.

Finn drops heavy references to the works of literary greats: Agatha Christie and Alexandre Dumas, “The Count of Monte Cristo” in particular. The epigraph is from “Bleak House.” A copy of “Rebecca” is the key to opening the door to a hidden room. The book includes a note on sources, citing Raymond Chandler and Dorothy Sayers, among others. Perhaps the purpose is to protect himself from another accusation of plagiarism, though it also comes off as rather self-aggrandizing: Does he think his words would be confused with those of Arthur Conan Doyle?

Let me end the suspense here: Even readers looking past Finn’s personal woes — or those looking at them and wishing him well anyway — will quickly be hoping for end of story.

End of Story

By A.J. Finn

William Morrow. 408 pp. $37

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• Review Requests
• Guest Post – Disrupted by B. Lynn Goodwin

The San Ramos High students are busy rehearsing their performance of Our Town when the school and the surrounding towns are rocked by a 7.1 earthquake. As a series of unusual aftershocks disrupt the town further, their school is deemed unsafe, and the show is postponed indefinitely unless they can find a way to turn that bad luck around. Dealing with their own personal difficulties and led by the stage manager, Sandee, who is working her way through the loss of her brother, they attempt to bring the community together, make the performance a success, and do their share to raise funds to rebuild. Both the show and life must go on!

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Taming fear.

A writer’s fears often manifest in questions:

• What if my story is rejected?
• What if I get a publisher, get bad reviews, and my writing career is over?
• What if my writing offends my relatives?
• What if my writing will never be good enough?
• What if no one ever reads my work?

I can catastrophize with the best of them, but a better strategy when these questions come up is to jump right into solutions.

You’re probably not writing for the fabulous income or for fame and fortune, though you may have that fantasy on a back burner. Even so it’s difficult not to let fear dampen or stifle some promising instincts. So here are some tips for rising above the fears that most writers, including good ones and even famous ones, face when they sit down at their computer.

• Take a deep breath.
• Read a line or two of praise from a reader or critique partner. Remind yourself of your motivation. What do you want to tell the world? What, specifically, are you afraid of? Why? Who could it help? Why are you the right person to share it?
• Try writing about your fears. Explain the problem. Ask yourself why you’re holding on to the fear? Ask yourself what you have to lose, and what you would do if you lost it?
• Then brainstorm solutions. Pick your favorite and act on it today.
• How many words did you write as you wrote that out? Congratulate yourself. You’re priming the pump and getting ready to write the big stuff.
• Next, let your protagonist ask you why you’re afraid to tell your story. Write your answer. Keep going. Dig deeper. As soon as ideas for your story pop up, get back into it.

Fear is the opposite of faith, love, and courage. You don’t want it to win the battle you’re engaged in, do you?

You believe in your story, don’t you?

Is it something that others might gain insight from? Then get back into it. Write your heart out. You can edit later—and you will—but you must have material on the paper before you edit.

Trust yourself, trust your story, ask for help when you need it, and know that no one can tell your story but you. Lean into the positive and let the negative fears slide out of the picture. If fear rears its ugly head again, beat it back with the same tools. Burn it out and let your story rise from the ashes.

Answers to the questions at the top of the article may be beyond your control, but your actions aren’t. Take the actions needed to tell, show, and share your story.

About the Author

Talent was short-listed for a Literary Lightbox Award and won a bronze medal in the Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards and was a finalist for a Sarton Women’s Book Award. A second edition came out on November 1, 2020, from Koehler Books. She also wrote You Want Me to Do WHAT? Journaling for Caregivers.

Her memoir, Never Too Late: From Wannabe to Wife at 62, won a National Indie Excellence Award, a Human Relations Indie Book Awards Winner, a Dragonfly Book Award, a Next Generation Indie Book Award, Best Book Awards Finalist & NABE Pinnacle Book Achievement Award Winner.

Her next book, Disrupted, will be out on January 25th.

Goodwin’s work has appeared in Voices of Caregivers, Hip Mama, Dramatics Magazine, Inspire Me Today, The Sun, Good Housekeeping.com, Purple Clover.com, and elsewhere. She is a reviewer and teacher at Story Circle Network, and she is a manuscript coach at Writer Advice. She always has time to write guest blog posts and answer questions. She loves working one on one, troubleshooting, and helping writers find what works. Contact her to see how she can help you.

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• Romance Spotlight – Love on the Edge of Time by Julie A. Richman

He likes whiskey and wild women She likes Ben & Jerry’s He’s about to get kicked out of his own band She ate her way off the Miss America pageant circuit What could these two possibly have in common?

A psychiatrist A lot of unresolved issues A whole bunch of shared lifetimes And a love that is never-ending

As bad boy rocker, Jesse Winslow, and former pageant queen, Kylie Martin, each fight the demons screwing up their lives, the one person who holds the key to healing their ills and reuniting two souls that have searched for one another, lifetime after lifetime, is the only one who knows the whole truth.

And keeping that truth from them may just be in preeminent psychiatrist Dr. Claire Stoddard’s best interests.

Claire has committed the ultimate sin in the medical world. She’s fallen for the one man she’s forbidden to love. Her patient, Jesse Winslow.

And she’s not about to lose him to Kylie Martin… Again.

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**Look for the sequel to this book to be released on April 18th, 2024! I will be sharing an excerpt later this week.**

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• Top Ten List & #Giveaway – A Beggar’s Bargain by Jan Sikes

A BEGGAR’S BARGAIN

The bargainer series, book one.

Historical Fiction / Literary Fiction

Publisher: Fresh Ink Group

Date of Publication: March 12, 2024

Number of Pages: 324 pages

Scroll down for Giveaway!

Desperate to honor his father’s dying wish, Layken Martin vows to do whatever it takes to save the family farm.

Once the Army discharges him following World War II, Layken returns to Missouri to find his legacy in shambles and in jeopardy. A foreclosure notice from the bank doubles the threat. He appeals to the local banker for more time—a chance to rebuild, plant, and harvest crops and for time to heal far away from the noise of bombs and gunfire.

But the banker firmly denies his request. Now what?

Then, the banker makes an alternative proposition—marry his unwanted daughter, Sara Beth, in exchange for a two-year extension. Out of options, money, and time, Layken agrees to the bargain.

Now, he has two years to make a living off the land while he shares his life with a stranger.

If he fails at either, he’ll lose it all.

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Sara Beth’s Top Ten Weird or Different List

Sara Beth is the female protagonist in this story. She has some unusual quirks I thought would be fun to share.

• She has a pet rabbit named Cuddles, and she takes the bunny everywhere she goes.
• She plays a thumb piano. Ever seen one of those?

3. Sara Beth learned to read Tarot cards from her deceased mother.

4. Sara Beth has gypsy blood in her from her mother’s bloodline.

5. She’s always suspected Homer Williams isn’t her real father. How could such a hateful, arrogant man sire her?

6. She loves music. When she arrives at Layken’s farmhouse, one of the first things she spots is a cabinet radio typical for the 1940s. She’s never listened to a radio.

7. Sara Beth has never taken a drink of liquor, but when a man offers her and Layken some apple pie moonshine at a street fair, she gets her first taste.

8. Sara Beth has soft, gentle ways, and this helps when she finds a terrified little boy living in a treehouse in the woods behind the farmhouse.

9. Sara Beth had never tasted a Coca Cola until a shopping trip into town with Layken.

10. Sara Beth has a loyal guardian, Uncle Seymour, who had promised her dying mother he would always look out for Sara Beth.

She openly admits that she never set out in life to be an author, although she’s been an avid reader all her life. But she had a story to tell. Not just any story, but a true story that rivals any fiction creation. She brought the entertaining true story to life through fictitious characters in an intricately woven tale that encompasses four books, accompanying music CDs, and a book of poetry and art.

And now, this author can’t put down the pen. She continues to write fiction in a variety of genres and has published many award-winning short stories and novels.

Jan is an active blogger, a member of Story Empire, a devoted fan of Texas music, and a grandmother of five. She resides in North Texas.

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GIVEAWAY!  GIVEAWAY!  GIVEAWAY!

Four winners:, two winners receive $20 amazon gift cards;, two winners receive ebook copies of a beggar’s bargain, (us only; ends midnight, cdt, 4/19/24).

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• Guest Post & #Giveaway – Paint Can Kill by Joanna Campbell Slan

Paint Can Kill: Cara Mia Delgatto Mystery Series Cozy Mystery 9th in Series Setting – Hobe Sound, FL Publisher ‏ : ‎ Spot On Publishing (December 15, 2023) Paperback ‏ : ‎ 252 pages

It’s raining outside, and it’s raining inside. Hey, that’s Florida. But as sassy entrepreneur Cara Mia Delgatto watches a van full of Highwayman paintings walk out the front door of The Treasure Chest–because the collection’s owner is taking them back–she’s crying on the inside all the way to the bank. There will be no quick fix for this. Instead Cara focuses on an outstanding bill. When she visits the wealthy woman who has stiffed her, Cara stumbles over another stiff, a dead body. With multiple crisises in her business life, Cara grieves the loss of her live-in love and her rescue Chihuahua. The man and the dog have left a huge hole in her heart. Will Cara survive all these losses? Cara Mia Delgatto Mystery Series is a clean read Features a female amateur sleuth and her friends Includes Florida lore and history Shares ideas for upcycling, recycling, and repurposing Celebrates friends, family, and fur babies

Read for Free via Kindle Unlimited

Recently, I took a “strengths” test, a free online questionnaire designed to help me see where I’m strongest. The point being, make use of your strengths. Play to them. Okay, I’ll admit I’m a sucker for silly tests that purport to tell me about myself. Are you? So, I answered the questions and learned I’m classified as a “problem-solver.”

That fits me to a tee. I love writing and crafting because I love solving problems. When you think about it, that’s what the two activities have in common: problems. When I write a book, I start with a group of general ideas. I might not even know who dies. I might not know whodunnit. Or I might change my mind about whodunnit. But I know enough that I’m curious. I want to put my characters in a tough situation and see what they do. Some authors call this “discovery” writing.

Writing this way means that each day, I sit down and discover stuff I didn’t know and definitely didn’t plan for. Does that mean I don’t use an outline? I use an outline. I’m not a slave to it, but I use one. I use a variety of tools. I keep a list of character names, a calendar for the actions, and often a map. I’ll scribble on scraps of paper, jotting down ideas as they come to me. Then, I’ll spread them out, bunch them into categories, and create links or bridges from one idea to another. I’ll also draw a Venn diagram showing how the friction occurs among characters. Eventually, I’ll find a theme for the book. It might not be readily apparent until I’m a good way along.

Do I get stuck? Occasionally, but actually not that often. When I do, it’s time for a break. Typically, I leave my desk and go to my rowing machine. Fifteen minutes later, my mind is clear. I can write this way because I believe, in my heart of hearts, that there’s an answer for every question. I just need to knuckle down and find it.

Joanna is a New York Times Bestselling, USA Today Bestselling, and Amazon Bestselling author, as well as a woman prone to frequent bursts of crafting frenzy, leaving her with burns from her hot glue gun and paint on her clothes. And the mess? Let’s not even go there.

Otherwise, Joanna’s a productive author with more than 80 written projects to her credit. Her non-fiction work includes how to books, a college textbook for public speakers, and books of personal essays (think Chicken Soup for the Soul).

Currently, she writes six fiction series: The Kiki Lowenstein Mystery Series (Agatha Award Finalist, contemporary, St. Louis setting, crafting), the Cara Mia Delgatto Mystery Series (contemporary, Florida setting, DIY, and recycling), the Jane Eyre Chronicles (Daphne du Maurier Award Winner, 1830s England, based on Charlotte Brontë’s classic), the Sherlock Holmes Fantasy Thrillers (late 1800s, based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s books), the Tai Chi Mystery Series (featuring a mature female amateur sleuth!) and the Friday Night Mystery Series (set in Decatur, IL in 1986 with a spunky female heroine.)

A former TV talk show host, college teacher, and public relations specialist, Joanna was one of the early Chicken Soup for the Soul contributors. She won a Silver Anvil for her work on the original FarmAid concert to benefit farmers.

In her ongoing quest never to see snow again, Joanna lives with her husband and their Havanese puppy, Jax, on an island off the coast of Florida.

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• Guest Post & #Giveaway – The Jammed Judges by D.S. Lang

The Jammed Judges: Doro Banyon Historical Mysteries Historical Cozy Mystery 3rd in Series Setting – Ohio Publisher ‏ : ‎ Debra Sue Lang (April 2, 2024) Number of Pages – Approx. 310

Journey back to the Roaring Twenties in small-town America and join Doro Banyon, college librarian and armchair detective, as she confronts another mystery. Spring in the air, and Doro is looking forward to her hometown’s May Day celebration. When her friend Aggie wins the baking contest, their celebration is short-lived because the two local lawmen—judges for the competition—fall ill after consuming extra portions of Aggie’s jam roll. Rumors run rampant, especially when the town doctor pinpoints the cause as arsenic poisoning. With the constabulary down for the count, the two friends must unravel the mystery. As they study possibilities, Doro and Aggie find plenty of dangling threads and likely suspects. Is someone trying to make Aggie look bad or get even with her? Or do area bootleggers want the police out of their way while a big load of illegal liquor is transported through the area? Doro resolves to crack the case before more trouble hits town.

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Hello! I’m Dorothea Banyon, but I go by Doro, and I am an amateur sleuth and college librarian in small-town Ohio during the Roaring Twenties. Things don’t roar all that much in my hometown, but there’s been an unusual number of crimes! Last year, I helped bring two killers to justice.

I love mysteries, and teach a course on whodunits, so going from armchair detective to amateur sleuth has been exciting. Ev Mallow, one of our local lawmen, gave me the promotion, after I helped him with an investigation.

My latest case, The Jammed Judges, sidelines two of my usual team members: Wade Lammers, the town constable, and Ev, the campus security officer and deputy constable. That leaves my best friend and sister professor, Agatha Darwine, and me to investigate.

How and why were the local lawmen put out of commission? That’s at the heart of the mystery. I’ll say this much, poisoning is not pretty, but it isn’t fatal in their cases, either. Since they’re able to talk, Aggie and I consult with them as we pursue the culprit. Although a threatening note ups the ante, we won’t stop sleuthing because the guilty party might strike again.

She writes historical mysteries set in small-town America during the Roaring Twenties. Her books feature women amateur sleuths dedicated to solving crimes, along with a team of colorful characters—often including a local lawman.

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Review – james rhyder and the cave of dreams by david s. brooks.

Twelve-year-old James Rhyder is being hunted by people from a hidden world he never knew existed. Unlike most people his age, James doesn’t dream at night of becoming a hero. Rather, his dreams are filled with shadowy figures and cryptic warnings about the end of the world.

As these strange dreams begin to make James question if he’s going crazy like his mother, a quirky girl named Rheyna Anwen whisks him away into an unseen world where psychics, druids, and magic are real.

At first the enchanted cabins and unusual summer camp where new psions, known as psychics to the outside world, are trained feels unbelievable, like one of his mystifying dreams. However, James soon discovers a secret about himself which threatens to turn this new life into a nightmare: his dreams are a dangerous and illegal talent known as dreamwalking. When a mysterious man in blue -who’d been stalking James all summer- kidnaps one of his cabinmates, his strange dreams may be the only way he can save his comrade.

Now, James must learn to trust his new friends, control his illegal psion talent, and put aside his insecurities. If he can’t, much more could be at stake than just one missing camper.

While fantasy is not a normal genre for me, this story about a teen boy finding his place in this world was entertaining. The author does a great job of world-building, introducing us to other mythical beings and letting us wonder, “What if.”

James has some special abilities he isn’t even aware of until he is brought into a special summer camp to learn more about these abilities. There are those who want to see him succeed and others who want to harness his abilities for themselves. Each character in the book is unique and brings something different to the table. This creates a well-rounded novel for the reader.

I really love how James spends a lot of time in the library. He is my hero! His passion for books helps him find his path in life…or at least a path to start down. Perhaps with a little nudging from the friendly older librarian.

The camp is unique, which shouldn’t be surprising since it has magical abilities too. The cabin for all of the newbies is a wonder and the stories it could tell from past and future campers.

There is something about Rheyna that is endearing. Perhaps because she befriends James. I think that they are both looking for something and find it in their friendship.

It would be easy to give away plot spoilers, so I won’t. Just know that this could easily start a series with their adventures or the adventures of those who come to the camp. Only time will tell if the author has more in store for us.

We give this book 4 paws up.

David Brooks is the author of over 100 middle-grade and young adult fantasy novels, only two of which have been written and released. That is to say, he is an author with an entire notebook bursting with ideas, and never enough time to get everything written. James Rhyder and the Cave of Dreams was his debut novel.

Excerpt – The Search by Dewayne Rahe

Journey into 1910 Iowa: Where Mystery, Adventure & Destiny Collide in Fred Schmidt’s Pursuit of Life’s True Purpose in The Search.

In rural Iowa, 1910, Fred Schmidt faces life’s pivotal question: How should he live his life? This compelling historical fiction transports readers into a world bursting with real and mystical characters. Teamed up with Artie Holberg, the ambitious son of a renowned horse trader, Fred embarks on an enthralling adventure-from a daring scheme in Minnesota to a treacherous escapade in pre-World War I Europe. Encounters with enigmatic figures like Count Von Drathen and the beautifully captivating Baroness Van Essen weave a tapestry of suspense, mystery, and revelation.

Dewayne Rahe, inspired by the rich background of his cultural heritage and history, masterfully blends history, destiny, and adventure in The Search. A tale about finding oneself amid life’s mysteries, this riveting narrative beautifully encapsulates the universal struggle of choosing one’s own path.

A must-read for fans of historical fiction, journey with Fred as he navigates the intricate map of destiny, love, and intrigue. Will the mystical voice guiding him reveal the truth he seeks? Dive in to uncover the thrilling conclusion. Don’t just read a story, experience the search for destiny.

From Chapter 16  The  Encounter

It was late afternoon and the sun’s final rays were fading from the western sky when the three men rode up the tree lined lane that was the entrance to the Van Essen Estate. The manor house was in the center of the courtyard, flanked on one side by servant’s quarters and on the far side by extensive stables and barns. The men dismounted and paused for a moment to take in the scene, marveling at the grandeur of the buildings and the grounds.

“Count Hugo, tell us again how you know this family. Did you really meet them in an army hospital?” asked Artie.

“Yes, strange as that may seem. It was during the war with France in 1871. The father Hans was in the bed next to mine recovering from his wounds. The nurse Anna, that cared for us was like an angel sent from heaven. She and Hans decided to marry after he recovered from his wounds.  Sadly, both of my old friends have now passed. Their daughter, the Baroness Van Essen has remained a close friend and confidant. I try to stop and visit her whenever I am in this part of the state of Westphalia. She often seeks my advice on the management of the estate,” proudly stated the Count.

“Frederick, Artie why don’t you take these poor, exhausted horses into the stables and get them bedded down for the night. I’ll go up to the manor house and make our arrival known. Come up to the house when you’re finished. They’ll be ready for you then.”

The old man had a spring in his step as he sauntered up the graveled driveway towards the manor’s front door. The boys led the three horses into a large but empty stable. Finding no one available to ask for permission, they took the three closest stalls. They unsaddled their mounts and began to feed and water them when the unmistakable cry of a nearby stallion filled the air. Artie worked at quieting their horses, while Fred left the stable to find the stallion.

He entered a stone barn a short distance away and there in a box stall stood the most beautiful black stallion he had ever seen. The young man and the horse stared at each other, as if each was taking the measure of the other. Fred noticed the beast’s long black mane and tail that someone had taken great pains to curry comb and braid. The horse reared on his hind legs as if to show that he was indeed the ruler of the stable. It was at that moment that a huge pile of loose, dusty hay came raining down on Fred from a shaft in the upstairs hayloft. The stallion pranced and snorted as if he was amused by the spectacle of the young man being completely covered in dusty hay.

“Hey, watch where you’re throwing that hay,” shouted Fred, quickly realizing that whoever was pushing down the hay probably didn’t speak English. It was then that a stable hand slid down from the loft on a rope and turned to face the dust covered young man. The youth had a cap pulled tight over their head and a bandana tied over their face to keep out the dust, revealing only their eyes. Fred stared into the bluest eyes he had ever seen and was momentarily mesmerized by them. Then brushing the dust from his hair and clothes he tried to converse in his inadequate German.

“Guten tag, Ich bin Frederick Schmidt from Amerika. Ich bin kaufen pferde. I’m here to buy horses,” Fred tried to inform the stable hand in both languages.

The young person stood transfixed and stared at Fred in disbelief. Muttering a barely audible, “Oh mein Gott,” the stable hand pushed past Fred and ran frantically from the barn. Fred was left standing in the stall covered with hay dust and chaff. It was then that Artie poked his head in the barn door and surveyed the comical situation.

Dewayne Rahe, a retired Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and author of Last of the Wild, resides near Dyersville, Iowa. Influenced by his rich cultural heritage and history, Dewayne writes captivating stories, seeking to share wisdom and guidance, especially for his ten beloved grandchildren. His books are highlighted with illustrations by his artist wife, Krystal. Beyond writing, Dewayne enjoys spending time with his family, gardening, biking, and traveling to his grandchildren’s numerous athletic events.

Review & #Giveaway – The Wedding by Kelly Smith

Four friends, one city. Grace, Piper, Sydney and Rachel navigate life, careers, and love in Boston. Each woman is newly single and looking for a fresh start. As their work lives start to look up, they each meet a new man who may be “the one”—or may not. The bond the four women share helps them make better sense of their lives, but at times their friendship causes more issues than it solves. New couples form, and one of them is headed for the altar. But which of the women is about to be a bride?

All along the way, Grace, Piper, Sydney and Rachel are each other’s biggest fans and cheerleaders. The Wedding explores the bond women share and the love they seek.

Four friends. Four relationships. Love and loss, but friendship endures.

This novel follows four friends, their careers, and the relationships that they form. Some are good, some not so good, but at least these women know who they can count on at the end of the day. Some of the relationships are trainwrecks waiting to happen. You know something isn’t right, but you don’t know what until the truth is revealed.

There is a wedding being planned between the chapters, but you have no idea which friend or couple it is until the end. I had my thoughts on who it should be, but I was wrong. You’ll have to read the book to find out who the mystery couple is.

As the book progresses, we learn about each woman’s past relationships, why they failed, and where their life is going. We saw them enter the dating world, whether they were ready for a relationship or not. But sometimes, you just have to get out there and see what happens.

I appreciated that once the mystery couple was revealed, the last chapter and the wedding shared with us what happened to the other three women in the group. I had a few ideas but wasn’t 100% sure what happened to each couple. Also, the last chapter seems to be a few years into the future. This gave a satisfying conclusion to this story.

My only complaint has nothing to do with the story but the eBook. The font is TINY. All ebooks usually load just fine for me, but this one was unreadable on my e-reader, and I had to read it on a larger tablet.

Overall, this is a fun read, and we give it 4 paws up.

Smith, an award-winning writer, writes for Elephant Journal and HuffPost. Smith is a dating expert for the online relationship and dating magazine, GoDates.

Smith is a certified relationship and dating coach who works with clients who are trying to rebuild their lives after an abusive relationship ends, or after a long-term relationship ends.

Smith is a Boston native who moved to the Austin, TX, area in July 2003 with her three sons.

Media Expertise Kelly can speak on topics including domestic violence in teen dating, narcissism and toxic relationships, women as the abusers, recovering from an abusive relationship, dating again after an abusive relationship, narcissism in both men and women and living as an adult child with a narcissistic parent.

  Website   ~    X (Twitter) ~ Facebook ~  Instagram  ~  Goodreads

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New Release – The Promise of Unbroken Straw by Ken Steele

Paul’s teachers say he’s distracted, and they’re not wrong. With the demands of a struggling farm, Allied boots in Europe, and secrets surrounding his mother’s death, who can blame him? And the expectations of his father are seemingly unachievable.

​When a financial windfall sparks a rags-to-riches transformation, it also sets in motion events that will test young Paul to his core. This coming-of-age story connects Paul’s tumultuous adolescence to his unfulfilled adulthood. Across those decades, he searches for redemption and reconciliation with the ghosts of his past.

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​The Promise of Unbroken Straw is Ken’s debut novel, a work of historical fiction. He resides in Colorado with his wife of 41 years, where his days are filled with pickleball, golf, hiking, and all that the mountains can offer.

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Review – all we were promised by ashton lattimore.

The paths of three young Black women in pre-Civil War Philadelphia unexpectedly—and dangerously—collide in this debut novel inspired by the explosive history of a divided city.

Philadelphia, 1837 . After Charlotte escaped from the crumbling White Oaks plantation down South, she’d expected freedom to feel different from her former life as an enslaved housemaid. After all, Philadelphia is supposed to be the birthplace of American liberty. Instead, she’s locked away playing servant to her white-passing father, as they both attempt to hide their identities from slavecatchers who would destroy their new lives.

Longing to break away, Charlotte befriends Nell, a budding abolitionist from one of Philadelphia’s wealthiest Black families. Just as Charlotte starts to envision a future, a familiar face from her past reappears: Evie, her friend from White Oaks, has been brought to the city by the plantation mistress, and she’s desperate to escape. But as Charlotte and Nell conspire to rescue her, in a city engulfed by race riots and attacks on abolitionists, they soon discover that fighting for Evie’s freedom may cost them their own.

All We Were Promised  is the story of three women in vastly different circumstances—the rebel, the socialite, and the fugitive—risking everything for one another in an American city straining to live up to its loftiest ideals.

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This was an educational yet entertaining read. I find myself enjoying historical fiction more than I have in the past, especially when the author does their research into events and tries to stay as close to the truth as possible. The author definitely did that here. I enjoyed reading her notes after the book to discover her inspiration for this novel.

This story is told from three points of view – Charlotte, Nell, and Evie. These three women have different lives, but they all have something in common: they want to see black people treated better and eliminate slavery. Charlotte and Evie were both slaves on the same plantation before Charlotte and her father escaped. It is by chance that they run into one another in Philadelphia. Nell is a free woman but has compassion for the enslaved and wants to do more than just raise money and sign petitions. She wants to take action.

I was drawn into each woman’s story. While living different lives, they wanted more from life. Each woman has their own struggles. Nell thinks she doesn’t want to marry anyone; however, her longtime friend across the street is becoming more appealing. Charlotte lives as her father’s maid since he can pass for a white man, but this situation is fraught with its own issues, hampering Charlotte’s dream to become a seamstress and dressmaker.  Evie is now the personal maid for Kate, Charlotte’s old position before she left, and wants out more than anything.

The journey these women are on is not an easy one. Emotions run high, there is impatience, and some actions by certain characters could end badly for everyone. The story did start a little slow, but it picked up the pace about halfway through when situations were heating up. I enjoyed watching the characters grow, mature, and discover their truer selves.

We give this book 5 paws up.

Ashton Lattimore is an award-winning journalist and a former lawyer. She is the editor-in-chief at Prism, a nonprofit news outlet by and for communities of color, and her nonfiction writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, Slate, CNN, and Essence. Lattimore is a graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and Columbia Journalism School. She grew up in New Jersey, and now lives in suburban Philadelphia with her husband and their two sons. All We Were Promised is her first novel.

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THIS IS A STORY

by John Schu ; illustrated by Lauren Castillo ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 14, 2023

A slightly lofty but sweet tribute to a book’s ability to create deep, lasting connections with readers.

To find just the right book—that is the question and the answer.

“This is a word. This is a word on a page. This is a page in a book.” A light-skinned family—two children and their caregiver—visits the library and finds a whole world of words, pages, shelves, and books waiting for readers to discover them and unlock their secrets. The older child, lying on their tummy, reads their book, enraptured. Other enthralled kids are there, too—“with minds full of questions…with ideas to explore…with hopes for the future…with imaginations ready to spark,” all caught up in the words in their own selected books, some of which readers may recognize. This brief, very simply told tale clearly makes the point that readers often forge meaningful connections with books. It also expresses the idea that a story “helps us understand…everything!” While this is a lovely notion, it’s a vague, idealistic (and not necessarily true) one that young children may not fully grasp—though they’ll relate to the idea of losing themselves in beloved books. The soft illustrations, created with ink, watercolor, and pastel, suit the gentle narrative. They depict racial diversity; one child is shown wearing a yarmulke. The children’s librarian is light-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Pub Date: March 14, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-5362-0452-0

Page Count: 40

Publisher: Candlewick

Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023

CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES

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BOOK REVIEW

by John Schu

by John Schu ; illustrated by Veronica Miller Jamison

ON THE FIRST DAY OF KINDERGARTEN

by Tish Rabe ; illustrated by Laura Hughes ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 21, 2016

While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of...

Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol.

The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip. While the days are given ordinal numbers, the song skips the cardinal numbers in the verses, and the rhythm is sometimes off: “On the second day of kindergarten / I thought it was so cool / making lots of friends / and riding the bus to my school!” The narrator is a white brunette who wears either a tunic or a dress each day, making her pretty easy to differentiate from her classmates, a nice mix in terms of race; two students even sport glasses. The children in the ink, paint, and collage digital spreads show a variety of emotions, but most are happy to be at school, and the surroundings will be familiar to those who have made an orientation visit to their own schools.

Pub Date: June 21, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-06-234834-0

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016

CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES

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by Tish Rabe ; illustrated by Sarah Jennings

by Tish Rabe ; illustrated by Dan Yaccarino

by Dev Petty ; illustrated by Lauren Eldridge ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 20, 2017

The dynamic interaction between the characters invites readers to take risks, push boundaries, and have a little unscripted...

Reinvention is the name of the game for two blobs of clay.

A blue-eyed gray blob and a brown-eyed brown blob sit side by side, unsure as to what’s going to happen next. The gray anticipates an adventure, while the brown appears apprehensive. A pair of hands descends, and soon, amid a flurry of squishing and prodding and poking and sculpting, a handsome gray wolf and a stately brown owl emerge. The hands disappear, leaving the friends to their own devices. The owl is pleased, but the wolf convinces it that the best is yet to come. An ear pulled here and an extra eye placed there, and before you can shake a carving stick, a spurt of frenetic self-exploration—expressed as a tangled black scribble—reveals a succession of smug hybrid beasts. After all, the opportunity to become a “pig-e-phant” doesn’t come around every day. But the sound of approaching footsteps panics the pair of Picassos. How are they going to “fix [them]selves” on time? Soon a hippopotamus and peacock are staring bug-eyed at a returning pair of astonished hands. The creative naiveté of the “clay mates” is perfectly captured by Petty’s feisty, spot-on dialogue: “This was your idea…and it was a BAD one.” Eldridge’s endearing sculpted images are photographed against the stark white background of an artist’s work table to great effect.

Pub Date: June 20, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-316-30311-8

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: March 28, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017

More by Dev Petty

by Dev Petty ; illustrated by Mike Boldt

by Dev Petty ; illustrated by Ana Aranda

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6 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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Our recommended books this week include two satirical novels — one about identity politics and victimization, the other about artificial intelligence and gender roles — along with Tana French’s second crime novel about a Chicago police officer who retired to the Irish countryside. In nonfiction, we recommend the story of a deadly avalanche, a philosopher’s exploration of the concept of giving up, and the gratifyingly intimate audio version of Barbra Streisand’s recent memoir, which she narrates herself. Happy listening, and happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

MY NAME IS BARBRA Barbra Streisand

Certain of the, shall we say, eccentricities (oh … the ellipses!) in Streisand’s 992-page doorstop of a memoir get wonderfully ironed out in audio form. Its sprawling a-star-is-born anecdotes seem to find their natural form in the towering performer’s 48-plus hours of discursive, disarming and often gloriously off-the-cuff narration.

“As Streisand recites the story of her life … she ad-libs off the written text, splices sentences, audibly shakes her head at dubious decisions, and altogether places us opposite her on the sofa with a cup of coffee for a two-day kibitz.”

From Zachary Woolfe’s review

Penguin Audio | 48 hours, 17 minutes

VICTIM Andrew Boryga

Boryga’s debut is a lively social satire about the fetishization of victimhood, following a young working-class student, Javi, who uses exaggerated stories of tragedy to earn attention and success. Boryga is having fun, and he’s inviting us to join in.

“Let’s be clear: Though Boryga is playing, he’s not playing around. Through Javi’s story, Boryga humorously and scathingly calls out the gluttonous consumption of stories of victimhood.”

From Mateo Askaripour’s review

Doubleday | $27

ANNIE BOT Sierra Greer

On the surface, “Annie Bot” is a story about an A.I. sex robot that grows more and more sentient, but underneath this high-tech premise is a sharp and smart exploration of misogyny, toxic masculinity, selfhood and self-determination.

“A brilliant pas de deux, grappling with ideas of freedom and identity while depicting a perverse relationship in painful detail.”

From Lydia Kiesling’s review

Mariner | $28

ON GIVING UP Adam Phillips

In his latest book, Phillips’s exploration of “giving up” covers the vast territory between hope and despair. We can give up smoking, sugar or a bad habit; but we can also give up on ourselves. Phillips proposes curiosity and improvisation as antidotes to absolute certainty.

“Phillips doesn’t try to prevent us from thinking whatever it is that we want to think; what he does is repeatedly coax us to ask if that’s what we really believe, and how we can be sure.”

From Jennifer Szalai’s review

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $26

THE DARKEST WHITE: A Mountain Legend and the Avalanche That Took Him Eric Blehm

In January 2003, seven skiers and snowboarders were killed in an avalanche on a glacier in western Canada. Among them was the American snowboarder Craig Kelly, and the adventure writer Blehm turns this page-turner not just into a biography of the athlete, but a tribute to the sport itself: addictive, thrilling — sometimes deadly.

“Probably the most unremittingly exciting book of nonfiction I have come across in years. I found myself reading late into recent nights wholly transfixed by every paragraph, every word.”

From Simon Winchester’s review

Harper | $32

THE HUNTER Tana French

For Tana French fans, every one of the thriller writer’s twisty, ingenious books is an event. This one, a sequel to “The Searcher,” once again sees the retired Chicago cop Cal Hooper, a perennial outsider in the Irish west-country hamlet of Ardnakelty, caught up in the crimes — seen and unseen — that eat at the seemingly picturesque village.

“The novel’s greatest pleasures — genuine twists aside — reside in the specific intersection of outsider and native, and particularly the former’s determined need to idealize, to claim, to tint whole rivers green.”

From Sadie Stein’s review

Viking | $32

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Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

What can fiction tell us about the apocalypse? The writer Ayana Mathis finds unexpected hope in novels of crisis by Ling Ma, Jenny Offill and Jesmyn Ward .

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Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

Book Review: Jen Silverman’s gripping second novel explores the long afterlife of political violence

In 1968, an apolitical grad student at Harvard gets drawn into the takeover of a campus building because he is in love with one of the organizers

Earlier this year a former member of the far-left Baader-Meinhof gang who spent decades in hiding was arrested by German police in connection with a string of crimes. It was just another example of the long afterlife of the anti-war movement of the late 1960s, which Jen Silverman explores in a brilliant, beautifully written new novel, “There’s Going to Be Trouble.”

Titling it after a line from an Allen Ginsberg poem — “My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble” — Silverman constructs an intricate, clever plot that braids together two separate stories connected by the main characters.

One takes place in 1968 when Keen, an apolitical grad student at Harvard, gets drawn into the takeover of a campus building because of his desperate love for Olya, one of the organizers. When the demonstration goes awry, he must live with the disastrous results for the rest of his lonely life as a chemistry professor and single dad. His one consolation is the daughter Olya bore him before going on the run. Everyone calls her Minnow, though she will grow up to embody the fierceness of her namesake Minerva, the Roman goddess of war.

The second storyline unfolds in 2018 during the yellow vest protests in France, where Minnow, now a 38-year-old teacher, has fled after being engulfed in a scandal in the U.S. whipped up by the religious right for helping an underage girl at her school obtain an abortion. In Paris, she gets caught up with a group of activists who, like their counterparts a half century earlier, are willing to go to virtually any length to challenge what they see as the inequities of French society.

Once again, love plays a decisive role. Just as her father fell head over heels for Olya, Minnow becomes enamored with Charles, the 23-year-old scion of a powerful French family whose father is a confidant of French President Emmanuel Macron. Though she has serious qualms about the 15-year age difference, she can’t keep her hands off him — and the feeling is mutual. Meanwhile, another brazen action is being planned that will also have deadly consequences.

Though the novel is a little slow to get off the ground and might have benefited from being 50 pages shorter, eventually it gathers unstoppable force as it moves toward a dramatic denouement that offers no easy conclusions. The questions Silverman poses about the ends and means of political violence are as relevant today as they were in the ’60s — or, for that matter, any era.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

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Amy Tan journeys from novelist to naturalist without leaving her backyard

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Book Review

The Backyard Bird Chronicles

By Amy Tan Knopf: 320 pages, $35 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Most birders have origin stories, the tales they tell of how birds, for whatever reason, moved from background to foreground in their lives. Novelist Amy Tan’s journey, catalogued in her delightful new nonfiction book “The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” began with a sketchbook and a pencil.

At the age of 64, she enrolled in a drawing class with naturalist John Muir Laws. She soon moved on to a class in nature journaling, which prompted her to begin closely observing the birds in the backyard of her Marin County home. She put out feeders and then documented — in words and sketches — the avian life that came to the buffet.

And quite a buffet it became. As her interest — some might say obsession — grew, Tan found herself catering to the tastes of dozens of species. She provided sunflower and nyjer seeds for the seed eaters, suet for the protein cravers, sugar water for the hummingbirds and sunflower chips for the ground feeders.

There were also mealworms, lots of mealworms, purchased thousands at a time and kept in the refrigerator until needed. “I pride myself a bit too much on having the best food for wild bird guests,” she writes. “I would never serve dried mealworms instead of live! That’s like giving your kid frozen broccoli instead of fresh organic.”

Tan’s observations of her avian guests, recorded in journal form, are both entertaining and informative. And the drawings that illustrate her musings are remarkable. In both her quick sketches and her more finished work, she captures not just the appearance but the demeanor of the birds she draws: the aggressive stance of a golden-crowned sparrow defending the birdbath; the hunched puffiness of a sick fox sparrow; the “yellow boots” and white eye-ring of a ruby-crowned kinglet; the unexpected tongue extension of a Bewick’s wren eating suet.

Often, she records some bit of avian yard drama graphic-novel style, with a headlined page of sketches and text documenting, say, how a “Hermit Thrush Goes Rogue,” or “Food Fights Among Juvenile Scrub Jays.” The drawings are charming, the text amusing.

That said, if you already know quite a lot about birds, you may find yourself annoyed that, initially at least, Tan is no expert. In one early journal entry, for example, she writes about her “palpitations from the excitement of spotting a species that I have never before seen before in my yard.” After making a quick sketch, she tries to identify the bird with the help of an app, and decides (correctly) that it is a Townsend’s warbler.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with getting excited about a Townsend’s. They’re beautiful small warblers with vibrant yellow and black heads. But they regularly winter in coastal California, and you might find yourself wondering why someone who couldn’t identify a species this common at a quick glance had decided to write a book about birds.

Stay with the book, though, and you’ll come to appreciate Tan’s approach. Like the early naturalists, Tan learns by watching, bringing no preconceptions, and it’s a pleasure to sit with her as she observes and accumulates knowledge. She takes careful notes, she sketches what she sees and she tries to draw conclusions.

As David Allen Sibley puts it in his excellent introduction (which even on its own would make this a book worth reading), “The drawings and essays in this book do a lot more than just describe the birds. They carry a sense of discovery…, suggest the layers of patterns in the natural world, and emphasize a deep personal connection between the watcher and the watched.”

And Tan is well-suited to being one of the watchers. “My impulse to observe birds comes from the same one that led me to become a fiction writer,” she writes. “By disposition I am an observer. I want to know why things happen.”

Often, her conclusions are spot-on. She observes that when her yard goes quiet, the reason is often that a Cooper’s hawk or another predatory raptor has landed in one of her trees, and the smaller birds are hoping to escape notice. She notes how fledglings follow their parents around the yard begging to be fed as if they were in the nest. She watches as California towhees drop worms from her feeders into a flower pot below so they can scratch for them in the soil the way they usually find food.

As she becomes better acquainted with the avian life in her backyard, Tan also begins to notice anomalies, including illness among the birds. Three times, after spotting birds in the yard that suffered from salmonellosis, conjunctivitis or avian pox, she had to shut down her feeders until the risk passed to prevent the diseases from spreading. And she documents her birds’ “heartbreak at my window,” on finding the feeders empty.

Does that border on anthropomorphizing? Of course. And Tan is unapologetic. “I am aware I have committed the naturalist’s sin of stereotyping the towhee as jolly and Scrub Jay as conniving. Science would require me to be objective and to not let personal bias obstruct more accurate observations. Thank God I am not a scientist. I love the jolly towhee and the smart and conniving Scrub Jay.”

And if some of Tan’s conclusions don’t stand up to scientific scrutiny, she provides fair warning. “Certainly no one should depend on me,” she warns. “I am all about free-form guesswork. That’s the fiction side of me.”

Don’t expect, however, the kind of elegant, carefully composed prose and structure that you find in an Amy Tan novel. That’s not what she set out to do. “A novel is a torment,” she explains. “It needs structure, tending of language, constant shaping, refinement, excision and cumulative insights.” By contrast, she says, this book “was pure fun, spontaneous, a bit of a mess come what may.”

Fun, messy spontaneity, it turns out, can make for an awfully good book.

Sue Horton is an avid birder and former op-ed editor of the Times. She is working on her first novel.

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A UX designer’s guide to Storybook

Organizations are seemingly starting to understand the role that design plays in building a successful business. That’s good news for us designers — whether it’s a mature company or a fast-growing startup, design-led organizations tend to see better performance.

One of the common success factors of design-led companies is being guided by a design system to develop products. Design systems give product teams, including designers and developers, reusable components and elements that they can leverage to build consistent, accessible experiences across products.

Development teams commonly use Storybook to build, test, and document UI components in isolation for their team’s design system. But it’s not just a great tool for developers to use — designers can also benefit from using Storybook for collaboration with engineering teams.

Storybook fills a gap in the component library space. If you synergize with your engineering teams and use Storybook, you’ll be able to integrate Storybook with Figma and ensure consistency across your team’s design system. Here’s how Storybook benefits you as a designer.

Understanding Storybook for UX designers

Storybook is a platform for UI development, testing, and documentation. It provides a frontend workshop to develop UI components and pages in isolation. Think of it like a sandbox, where you can experiment with building new UI components without it affecting your main application.

Storybook enables developers to test out different use cases for each component, such as various key states, that might be more difficult to reproduce in an app. Then, you can easily save those states as stories, which you can refer back to during testing and documentation.

Comparison with Figma

Based on UX Tools’ 2023 Design Tools Survey , Figma is the most popular primary design tool for design teams when it comes to user interface design and prototyping.

One of Figma’s notable features is the ability to manage and publish libraries. You can create a library of design assets, such as reusable components, styles, and variables, which can then be selected to use in other design files. Storybook is similar to Figma’s library feature but for developers, in the sense that users can create, test, and document reusable assets for their design system.

Storybook’s stories capture the different rendered states of each component, such as primary, secondary, large, or small versions of a button. This enables the design system to cover all edge cases of a component.

In Figma, users can create component variants, which serve the same purpose as stories. Using variants, a Figma component can have multiple states, for example, such as default, hover, and active states. Users can easily switch between variants when using components in their designs:

Storybook also displays code snippets for each component, enabling developers to copy and use the code for their applications. Similarly, you can dig into the layers of a component in a Figma library to understand how it was created, which you can then use in a separate design file:

How Storybook is filling the gap between Figma and code

In product development, designs are first created in Figma before handing them off to developers. During the handoff process, both teams collaborate to communicate the goals of the design and technical constraints. Then, developers implement the designs into code, using Figma’s Dev Mode to inspect designs and gather the specific measurements and properties:

Each time a component is created or updated in the Figma library, this process is repeated all over again. In this scenario, designers and developers are often working in siloes without effective communication. This can lead to different results between designs in Figma and implemented code.

This gap between Figma and code is being filled by tools like Storybook. Inconsistencies in documentation between Figma and code can create two “sources of truth,” one for designers and one for developers.

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Storybook brings both teams together, providing a platform for them to work together during the process of developing UI components. Designers can collaborate with developers to review components they’re building in Storybook, test edge cases, and write documentation from a design perspective. This can include when to use each state of the component and how to ensure that it maintains accessibility standards in its usage.

Live editing with Storybook Controls

Designers don’t need to know how to code to live edit components using Storybook. Each story, or rendered state, of a component includes Controls, a function that enables users to edit a component’s inputs from the Storybook interface. Controls leverage types used in type systems, like TypeScript, to auto-generate a graphical control.

Storybook dynamically generates the Controls, making it easier for users to interact with and customize components. You can simply adjust the Controls, for example by toggling a Boolean switch, editing a label, or selecting a different color for the component story and watching the preview of the story update in real time.

This simple process of live editing components in Storybook enables designers to collaborate closely with developers to create and maintain design system components. Using Controls, you can test out components to ensure that they adhere to the design specs or can handle edge cases.

Having a shared platform to edit UI components reduces the possibility of miscommunication and ensures that both your teams are aligned. This allows for a true single source of truth to exist because both teams can contribute and refer back to the components in Storybook:

Best practices for organizing your Storybook

A design system seems intimidating to someone who isn’t involved in its creation or familiar with what it is. Design systems should be welcoming! Do this, and you increase the likelihood of adoption by your team members.

As a designer, think of your target audience, including developers, product managers, and other designers, and cater the experience of the design system to them. In Storybook, you can organize your design system so that users can easily understand its purpose, how to get started, and how to contribute back to it.

Just like a good website, create an overview page that welcomes your users into your team’s design system. In the overview, you can communicate your team’s vision for creating the design system and what its purpose is within your organization.

Use this space to educate users that may not be familiar with what a design system is, how it benefits your team, and what they can expect to find in Storybook:

Getting started

Help your users get started by providing a few call-to-actions (CTAs) that lead to each section of the design system in Storybook, such as design tokens, foundations, or components, with a short description for each. You can also link to external supporting pages, such as your team’s GitHub repo:

Contribution guidelines

Design systems are a collaborative effort to maintain, involving both the design system team and contributors. Include contribution guidelines that offer information on how to submit feedback, report issues, or propose new components to your design system. These instructions empower your team to contribute back to the design system and continuously improve it as your products evolve. It also helps foster a sense of ownership and community, as it enables anyone on your team to submit contributions:

Design tokens

The foundation of a design system defines the style, look, and feel of your company’s products. Design tokens replace hardcoded values and allow for easy maintenance, as updating the value of a token will apply to all applications of that token.

In this section, include design tokens for elements like colors, typography, spacing, elevation, icons, and any other tokens that your design system needs. This section should also include guidelines on how to properly use tokens in application to ensure that accessibility standards are met:

Following the design tokens, this is where your design system’s components and patterns live. Each component contains stories representing the different states available to use. Designers can provide usage guidelines for each story to ensure that they are applied properly in implementation and design:

Accessibility

A design system should have accessibility embedded into its design tokens, components, and patterns. Start by defining your team’s accessibility principles to communicate a clear vision for how accessibility should be approached in product design and development. This should include your organization’s minimum accessibility compliance level, as well as links to further resources, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) international standard.

For each element in your design system, include specific documentation to ensure that they comply with the minimum standard level of accessibility. Often, elements or components may be accessible on their own, but can be made inaccessible when combined with others in a larger, complex design. Offer guidance on how to apply each element in designs and development while maintaining accessibility:

Integrating Storybook and Figma

Now that the design system has established Storybook as its source of truth, there’s still the task of maintaining consistency with your team’s Figma design library. With a complex product and a distributed team, it can be quite a challenge to create and maintain consistency across products and tools. Luckily, tools exist to integrate Figma and Storybook to provide a more seamless experience while managing your design system.

Storybook design addon

Once your design system components have been created in Figma, don’t let them stay hidden there. The Designs addon allows you to embed Figma designs into Storybook for a better design and development workflow.

With this addon, when users view a component in Storybook, a Design tab will appear under the story to show the embedded Figma designs. This can be useful for identifying discrepancies between the design and implemented component as well as providing additional usage examples from your Figma file:

Storybook plugin for Figma

Using Storybook Connect , a plugin for Figma, you can embed stories of your components into your Figma library. Similar to the Storybook design addon, you can use the Storybook plugin for Figma to cross-reference your coded components with your designs.

You can interact with your stories directly in Figma and conveniently compare the implementation to the design. It can be used in both Design and Dev mode in Figma:

Generating a Figma library from Storybook

For teams that find it hard to keep their Storybook components in sync with their Figma library, tools such as story.to.design or Anima can automatically generate Figma components using your Storybook stories.

This can significantly speed up the time it takes to create an initial design library in Figma or update existing components to match what’s already implemented. The great thing about these tools is that they can translate the code, such as CSS props, into Figma auto layout so that your design components are flexible and ready to use:

Design systems are the foundation for delivering consistent and accessible product design. But there’s often a disconnect between the components that are designed and implemented in code.

The design handoff process can be time consuming and filled with miscommunication. With Storybook, designers and developers can easily collaborate together to build, test, and document their team’s design system assets, including design tokens, components, and accessibility guidelines.

And the best part is designers don’t need to know how to code. Storybook provides tools like live editing with Controls so that anyone can test out components. With addons and integrations, both teams can view both designed and coded components in Storybook and Figma, ensuring alignment across the board.

If your team isn’t using Storybook to organize and maintain your design system, it can be a powerful tool to explore further. The platform bridges the gap between UX designers and developers, empowering them both to create a design system that can be used as a single source of truth for their organization. Streamline your design system process and spend more time building great products for your users.

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