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How “Reader” “Review”-Bombing Will Murder Fiction
“The default mode can’t always be rage. It just can’t.” — Seth MacFarlane
The New York Times headline for an article about Goodreads accountholders gathering with metaphorical torches to drive a novel out of town was, “How Goodreads Review-Bombing Can Tank a Book Before It’s Published.”
It should have been “How Goodreads Review-Bombing Will Be the Death of Fiction.”
The article’s primary subject is Cecilia Rabess, author of Everything’s Fine, which Goodreads accountholders “flooded with negative comments and one-star reviews” after reading a plot summary online that was written by an advance reader, “with many calling the book anti-Black and racist. Some of the comments were left by users who said they had never read the book, but objected to its premise.”
Had the commenters (who ostensibly joined Goodreads because they liked to read books and thoughtfully discuss or review them) bothered to read Rabess’s novel before virtually piling on, it’s possible they’d have discovered what Alice O’Keeffe, books editor for The Bookseller magazine, observed in her profile of Rabess and her novel:
A straightforward love story this is not: Everything’s Fine asks thought-provoking and sometimes uncomfortable questions about…
