I have a confession to make here which will surprise exactly no one: I'm a fan of Google Alerts. In fact, I've got a dozen or so set up, with variations on my name, my book titles, and various combinations. It's not ego (no, not really), more a desire to see what's being said about me out on the interwebs.
As a result, I end up getting a number of Alerts everyday. A few minutes from now, for example, I'll get 3 or 4 different ones all referring to this posting. Most of them are pretty banal — an Ebay auction, a listing at Amazon, the fact that I have a Facebook page, a notation that I've got a review published, that sort of thing.
Every so often, though, there will come notice that a review OF one of my books has just appeared. Cue a few seconds of trepidation as the link loads, that moment of mixed dread and anticipation as I read the first paragraph, followed by a sigh, one way or another.
And then there are moments like this morning, when the Google Alert pinged me to a new posting from The King of Nerds, a review of The World More Full of Weeping. Let me tell you, that review brought a smile to my face on a morning where, frankly, I was feeling like something that had died, then been dragged behind a truck over several miles of bad road.
It wasn't just that it was a positive review, though. I mean, I REALLY like positive reviews. But this one, written by a New Jersey librarian, was… different.
And it made me think.
I've written a lot of reviews. A LOT of reviews. Conservatively, somewhere likely in the neighbourhood of 500+ over the last decade. I know a bit about reviewing…
It's an interesting gig, an interesting mindset to live one's life within.
I've made it my goal to take each book as a unique entity, to respond to each work according to the terms the book itself dictates. Thus, I don't look at something by Dan Brown through the same lens as I do something by Michael Ondaatje: the book has to succeed (or, in the case of The Lost Symbol, fail) on its own terms. As a result, I stand behind every one of those reviews, no matter where my opinions fall with regard to the rest of the critical consensus.
The opinions I've been the proudest of, though, are those where I have heard from the writer that I "got it", that my reading — positive or negative — engaged with the book at a fundamental level. I won't name names — THAT would be ego — but there have been a number of occasions where I have heard from the authors that this has happened — it's gratifying, for a reviewer, to hear that their job has, indeed, been well done.
(There have been a few occasions where something… similar… has happened, to a greater degree, times when I know, from the author's reaction, that I "got" the book in a way that he — or, in this particular example I'm thinking of, she — fundamentally didn't. Those situations are much, much more uncomfortable, but just as rewarding, in a sick way. And no, I'm not going to name names. Well, buy me a drink and ask… we'll see.)
I hadn't, however, seen the OTHER side of the equation, hadn't experienced, as an author, how it feels to be "got". Until this morning.
The King of Nerds — Mike Ferrante — GOT The World More Full of Weeping in a way that I have never had a reader express to me before. The areas that he discusses in his review — the narrative approach of the novella, the impact of its last few pages, "the sudden revelation what is lost in the transition from childhood to adulthood; the sudden sense of bereavement due to the lost mystery of the hidden world and the stark reality of world without magic" — those are all things that I would have wanted to see discussed in a review. Those were the things that I wanted readers to notice, and his emotions are those that I wanted readers to come away from the novella with. I couldn't have asked for a better reading.
The process of writing and reading is one of communication. I never send messages with my work, but, yes, there are things that I want a story to do for a reader, in order for that bit of communication to be successful. When a reader "gets it", that's really all I can hope for.
And to hear about a reader "getting it"? That's more rewarding than I could possibly have imagined.