- Select one of the crowd sourced review sites or search for prolific book bloggers in the field and have a look at the way these reviewers discuss fiction relevant to school libraries.
- Share a link to an interesting book blog, Goodreads or LibraryThing review and discuss your thoughts on the value of such a review, and what issues there might be for relying on such sources as selection aids.
I decided to firstly explore the part that asked to “search for prolific book bloggers in the field”. To be honest, I don’t know any that specifically focus on texts relevant to school libraries. I did find a website called School Library Journal that had a book reviews section and the good thing about this was it indicated what age the books being reviewed would be suitable for. The reviews were brief but I felt like they had credibility purely for the fact that they were coming from a site that specialises in school libraries and therefore should have a knowledgeable team of writers.
I then followed this up with a review on Goodreads for Mice by Gordon Reece which is a book studied by Year 9 at my school. It was given 3/5 and had a very personal tone. It judged the book but not in an overly analytical way. Therein lies the issue with relying too heavily on reviews from the general public. They’re going to be mixed and may be more emotionally driven than focusing on the specifics of the book such as structure, characterisation, language, fluency, clarity etc. That being said, sometimes they can articulate aspects of the book that were liked or disliked in a way that the reader themselves could not so they still have vaildity. I’m just not sure that I would rely only on crowd sourced reviews.
References:
The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik by David Arnold. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.slj.com/2018/04/reviews/books/strange-fascinations-noah-hypnotik-david-arnold-slj-review/
Mice by Gordon Reece (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9895889
