Reviewer’s Choice – How Does the AAR Team Decide What to Review?
Previously on the blog, AAR’s Kristen wrote about how many different corners of Romancelandia there are, and how there seems to be less and less overlap in the “must-reads” and canonical works of each corner. There’s Amazon best-seller Romancelandia, Twitter Romancelandia, Goodreads Romancelandia, and blog circles that overlap to varying degrees, just to name some of the biggest players. With all of these places, and a world in which reading time is unfortunately and totally unfairly finite, where do our reviewers look for buzz? How do reviewers pick the books that end up on our review database? […]
As a reviewer, avoiding spoilers in my assessment of a novel is important. Generally, the rule is that anything that is revealed on the back cover summary or within the first 100 pages of a novel is okay to share; anything past that, would be spoiling the novel. Of course, sometimes it’s the information that occurs after the first 100 pages that make or break a novel. I’ve gotten pretty good at making my allusions to such events vague enough that my criticism (or praise) is clear, but the plot development is not.
I admit it: I am a