Ny Times Book Reviewers Novels & Stories

About what it is to be the daughter of a man who trusted the truth more than he trusted his own safety. The book is reviewed in three national publications in the week of its release. Two of the reviews are the kind that a first-time author does not anticipate receiving — serious and specific and written by people who have read it rather than read about it. The third review is in a financial publication and is largely concerned with the Blackwood Holdings story as a corporate narrative, which is not the book I wrote. I read it with the equanimity of someone who has learned that not every reader is your reader and that this does not diminish the ones who are.

Her I*******m was opened and yes, the I*******m page was sitting right there with a total of two million followers and zero following. "Nat...this is huge." I breathed. Your favorite book critic is basically someone who accepts read requests from random people and then she reads the book and drops both the good and bad reviews about the book. Sometimes the bad outweighs the good and vice versa. "I know." She answered. "Why didn't you tell your brother?" I asked her.

I called again, moving toward the door but I got no answer. This guy is not only a nerd, he is also weird and somehow crazy. I wonder how I was going to cope with him when I joined his book club. I grabbed my phone off the table and unlocked it. As the screen popped on, messages flooded in. Group chats messages , especially the ones I've muted for a while now. ‘Arian Smith, Orleans College Book Club President, Accused of Misusing Club Funds.’ I blinked, trying to wake myself from the dream. I scrolled down, read it again and it was still the same.

“Did you read the Sunday Times arts section yesterday?” “No, I was taking a day off. What did they say?” “Nothing good. Not only the Los Angeles Times, but we were also creamed in the New York Arts section and Publishers Daily. Here, look.” Anna scanned through the sections. Each one was filled with negative comments about the book and personal attacks on the author. “How did this happen? No one called me for comments. It’s all one-sided. We only handed out a few preview copies. How was this possible that so many reviewers jumped on it so fast?”

The reviews began arriving on Thursday. Patricia Osei had told me to read them but not to organize my understanding of the book around them because the book had been written for the women in the long middle and the women in the long middle were not the reviewers. The reviewers were the first room the book passed through on its way to the people it was for. The first review I read was from a literary publication that described the book as unflinching and specific and written with the particular authority of someone who had lived inside the thing she was describing rather than observing it from outside.

If the outside reviewers had fully understood the book, the book would not have been doing what it was trying to do. "The reviewer who found it," Ernest had said, "wrote for a gardening quarterly with a circulation of two thousand." "Yes," Don had said. "The audience that matters found it." Don had looked at him across the kitchen table. "The audience that matters has been finding it since The Inside Account. One person at a time. One review at a time. One letter at a time."