Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

Four days ago, I read the Kirkus review of Lara Avery's The Memory Book after seeing it linked on the Kirkus Best YA of 2016 list. I promptly placed a library hold.

One day ago, my hold came in at the library and I read this novel from the point of view of a teenager diagnosed with Neimann-Pick type C, a rare lysosomal storage disease which causes physical and cognitive degenerative symptoms.

Two years and two days ago, my sister died of Late Onset Tay-Sachs disease, a rare, adolescent-onset lysosomal storage disease which causes physical and cognitive degenerative symptoms.

So. That happened.


( Some spoilers behind cut, warned for. )

In conclusion: Fuck Tay-Sachs. And Neimann-Pick, and Gaucher, and this whole shitty family, and all the rest of the rare diseases.

Let me talk briefly about one of the many reasons I love Kirkus Reviews and my editor.

I've reviewed for many journals over the years, but Kirkus is the only one I've stuck with. Kirkus is also one of the only two major review journals with anonymous reviews. Kirkus claims to have an editorial voice, which is why the unsigned reviews, but while the Children's and YA Editor, Vicky Smith regularly grooms my words, she almost never modifies the thurst of the content without discussing it with me first. Sometimes she asks me for a clarification, a polish, or -- if I've crossed the line from the necessary honesty of which Kirkus reviewers are proud, to the brutality of which we're sometimes accused -- textual support to justify a surfeit of negativity. Sometimes she gives me context I didn't have (such as a publisher's indication they've changed some wording) and asks me to rewrite. Maybe once or twice in my years at Kirkus, at most, she's simply disagreed with me and rewritten in that light.

All of which is far more than she need do, because I am a writer-for-hire both legally and artistically, and while I craft reviews of which I'm proud, my job is to create reviews in the Kirkus editorial voice.

Years ago, I reviewed for another source which did have the reviewers sign the reviews. Each of those reviews was signed with my name. And every one of those reviews was edited extensively. Those edits were comprehensive in word, tone, and thrust, sometimes completely changing my judgement and analysis. As one point I wrote to the journal asking for more feedback about what they wanted me to be writing in the first place, explaining that I felt uncomfortable having my name on "work which has been so greatly modified from my original as to be scarcely recognizable," which was putting it mildly. They misunderstood, explaining they were grateful to get the sense of the reviewers' opinions, even on reviews they just then rewrote.

I began to get very uncomfortable when I realized how often they were mellowing out my negative reviews (or flat out making them positive), which happened most frequently when I complained about racial stereotypes in books. Tonight, I happened across one such review from many years ago. It was one of the only reviews I ever wrote where they kept the word "stereotype," though they made the assessment of the book much more positive than I did. I assume they kept the word because I provided textual support: six quotations, including awful representation of Native Americans, East Asians, and indigenous South Americans. One of those quotations was a massive othering of the protagonist of color starting from the book's opening pages, while several others were repulsive depictions of a non-Western country's everyday elements as being nasty, superstious, and like unto gothic horror.

Eventually I realized that I was simply unwilling to have my name on the reviews as they were rewritten. Honestly, there was a part of my brain that said "if Debbie Reese critiques something said under my name, am I willing to stand behind it?" [1]

So here's why I love Kirkus:

• If I can provide textual support for an assessment, my editor has my back.
• Vicky has never once suggested I'm too sensitive to representation issues in fiction; she's only asked me for textual support.
• If the judgement is changed in a review, she usually tells me why and I trust her decisions.
• She's asked me for a second opinion when she wanted a confirmation on a review that mentions a group I'm a part of, and I assume she does it with reviews I write as well, which adds to my confidence.
• My name's not on the reviews anyway, woohoo

In short, Kirkus++.

---

[1] I second-guess my reviews all the time. I still regret reviews in which I was, in retrospect, overly concerned with a social justice analysis which was inappropriate for the length of the review and the depth of the problem. I also regret reviews in which I let deeply problematic elements of a book slide. It's a perennial balancing act. To anyone who thinks reviewers shouldn't address social justice concerns in their reviews, I obviously think you're profoundly mistaken, and I can write about that later if anyone wants, but that's another story for another post.

I also second-guess my reviews for other reasons. Was I too kind to a bland waste of paper? Was I overly influenced by an author's fame? Did I conflate my taste with quality (in either direction)? Did I ignore the value a book would serve to its readers despite all its problems? Do I need to stop reviewing when I'm battling migraine aura? That's why I recommend trusting more than one professional review source, especially if you're buying on a budget for a collection (eg librarians, teachers). Personally I recommend Kirkus and PW, but YMMV.

[back]

I realize I am actually sick of talking about terrible people and how they treat people badly. So I'm going to talk about something positive: This is my review of Revolution 60, the game created by Giant Spacekat. Disclaimer: I'm a book reviewer, not a game reviewer. I'm not going to review this in a critical, professional way, but only my very personal reaction.

As you know, Bob, I have pain and dexterity problems in my hands, severely limiting what I can do on a touchscreen. I'm not dexterous, I'm not fast, and I have to be enjoying myself a lot to spend spoons on a game. These days most of my gaming is shared with my housemates, where they drive the controller but we make decisions together. Many of the games I install on my iPhone get rapidly deleted for this reason, and even the ones that I do play I specifically don't play in timed modes, or modes that require dexterity.

So I was a little bit nervous about Revolution 60. I knew there was a combat system, which was necessarily going to push my limits. I picked up the game anyway, on the recommendation of a coworker. (This was when the game first launched, long before the Internet blew up at Brianna Wu.)

( Revolution 60 review )

I don't actually want a professional tumblr, but it strikes me that this brief but very wise comment by diceytillerman is exactly the kind of thing that tumblr re-blogging is good for:

I will be fascinated for the rest of my life that some of the same things are archetypal and intertextual and deep when written well, but are stale derivatives when written poorly.

Via "No formula"

Dicey has been schooling me for years to pay attention to this when I write my reviews. Frequently the problem with the book is not that it's derivative, but that the characters are flat, the prose is uninspired, etc. And yet when all of those things are true, what you see is how derivative it is.

The same goes for certain other negative terminology. "Didactic", for example, is a term you apply to a terrible book with an overt moral lesson, whereas a good book with an overt moral lesson might get "thought-provoking". "Problem novel" versus "relevant".

Full disclosure: diceytillerman and I have an ongoing disagreement about the usefulness of the term "problem novel" given that we both define it differently. I've been trying to reclaim some of these terms myself, to use them descriptively about books that I like. Trying to pin down why I want to define I am J (a young adult novel about a trans Jewish Puerto Rican) as a problem novel, while I don't want to apply that same term to, say, The First Part Last (a young adult novel about an upper-middle-class adolescent black single father), if I'm not going to use high/low quality as one of my available definitive points, is... complicated.

the amazing diceytillerman, with assist from sanguinity, has made an excellent bulleted list of "A few things to think about when reading fiction about American Indians". I find this list incredibly valuable as a reviewer.

(This list is also valuable in reading fiction which is not about American Indians or other native populations, but which talks about them. I think of all the books I've reviewed for which the character, almost always white, shows their Social Justice Awesomeness by doing a school report about How We Killed off All the Indians Because We Are Bad, or has their epiphany moment by going on a Dream Vision Quest and giving themselves a name like Happy Running Deer. When I get one of those books, I'm coming back to this list.)

I've heard a lot of people griping lately about all the mermaid books, but I can't deny that they are vastly preferable to the glut of angel/demon books. And of course, every mermaid or angel book is one less werewolf.

<shameful confession>I never have gotten sick of faerie books, as long as they are decently written.</shameful confession>

Which is not to say that I currently am not craving realism in a way I never have before. Last night I read Cecil Castellucci's Beige (teen from Montréal, daughter of a recovered groupie, has to spend the summer in LA with her punk rocker dad) and loved it, and I've got an Interlibrary Loan copy of Tanita Davis's Mare's War sitting on my desk for next, which, if it is half as good as her À la carte, will be gorgeous. I suspect it's in the same family as Beige, as well, When the protagonist has to spend the summer with an estranged family member and in doing so, learns something about his or her past and becomes a better person. It's a pretty common theme in middle grade and young adult literature, but you can go a lot of different directions with it.

My point is, we need a paranormal romance where one of the boys is a abbey lubber and the other is a mind flayer.

Personally, I've always felt that Kirkus Reviews' reputation for being mean is undeserved. On the other hand, I have to say that I absolutely adore our willingness to tell it like it is. Although in this case, no reviewer commentary was necessary, clearly.

Not quite five weeks ago, Kirkus was sold. Two weeks ago, Library Journal and School Library Journal were sold. Now VOYA has been sold.

I can't tell if I am exhausted by the volatility of this industry or relieved all of these journals keep finding buyers. Both, I suppose.

Guys, guys! Usually I like to respond to every comment, but so many of you commented on my last post with variants of "yAt!", "\o/", and for those who believe in actual words, "hip hip, huzzah!" that I can only respond to all of you that I am still grinning like an idiot over here. Also, the occasion has prompted the second ever icon I have made for this account. After all, this is a professional blog, so it's not all about making silly icons, right?

Except cqs made a comment, and then bigbrotherreads made me a matching icon, and I just couldn't resist.

Really I should wait until there is actual news, so I am not hexing things in advance of them telling us "by the way, your pay has been cut to this shiny new nickel, and from now on we can only write positive reviews," but somehow I doubt our fearless leaders would have sold our souls for such business.

I've reviewed children's and YA books for KLIATT, Jewish Book World, Horn Book Guide, and Horn Book Magazine, and I'm not speaking hyperbolically when I say none of them compared to my seven years with Kirkus. At Kirkus I've had two editors who were mentors, helping me become a better critic and prose crafter. Kirkus's so-called grouchiness is really a committment to fairness -- not fairness to the book, but fairness to our audience, which is to say, the teachers and librarians who need to spend their limited collections budgets wisely, and the children and teens they serve.

In seven years, I gave stars to 25 books, and I'm sure I completely panned far fewer. I had my editors demand more substance to back up negative statements, and once had a book taken from me and given to another reviewer because my editor felt I was insufficiently appreciative of the audience that would like it. At Kirkus, every review was written with the tiny collections budget in mind, with the idea that, if a book has a potential audience, the Kirkus reader wants to know about it.

Yes, we are often negative in Kirkus. That's because we have that tiny collections budget in mind. We're not worried about the feelings of the author but about the budget of the teacher or the librarian. We want brutal honesty, both positive and negative, in the service of that audience.

For business reasons beyond my ken, Kirkus was priced out of the affordability range of our prime audience. Now the children's and YA literature world has lost an invaluable resource. Just as politics bloggers provide a valuable new service but don't replace investigative journalists, book bloggers will not make up for the loss of Kirkus. They don't fill the same niche.

Good luck, PW, SLJ, and VOYA. Keep the flag flying.

Kirkus Reviews: 1933-2009