Charlie Jane Anders has some thoughts about reviews, and then Roseanna Pendlebury has some additional correctives or additions because, well, reviews aren’t for authors, they are for readers, and so figuring out whether a book should be bought or not is actually not all there is too a review.

And yes but also

One thing about “reviews are for readers” is that readers can actually … learn how to be readers, and how to be better readers. Hopefully we are trying to do that, at least some of the time. So my own preferences when reading a review (which, yes, I need to get back into doing more, but even though this is the season of making resolutions, I’m not going to step on that guilt rake right now), is to read something that I can apply to something else that I’m reading. Ideally, even if I never read the book under review, the review will make me think about why I decide to pick it up, or not, or notice something about some other book I’m reading, or make me more mindful in the future, or in some other way, regardless of the actual subject of the review, impact me as a reader with every new book I read. (Yes, small goals)

And yes, there’s something about “who is writing reviews and in what venue” and having someone who hasn’t had a book blog or other contribution to whatever the SFF discourse is in basically years comment on a reviewer who’s doing “thoughtful, directed, insightful critique” among the unpaid blogs and zines (I am so glad that such things still exist! Were it not for my wariness of making myself feel guilty for failing, I would aspire to rejoin these ranks), who is in turn commenting on the thoughts of someone who has a paid and structured gig at a major publication with an audience primarily not of deeply involved SFF people inevitably means that we all have different things to say.

And yes but also, this thing, about how the point of a review is that it should better me as a readerer, regardless of whether I ever read the book, is my thing to say, and so I shall (or I suppose, and so I have)