Bad Goodreads Reviews - Bad/stupid/etc reviews and other garbage found on book tracking site Goodreads

[Midge Shelby1919]

Ah, I was wondering whether Chai would pop up. She's kind of infamous in that sphere.
For the context, she's an "aggressively sapphic" Muslim French uni student. In other words, she's just a generic Muslim of Moroccan descent that compensates for her no doubt fairly conservative upbringing by pretending to be a lesbian / bisexual / genderfluid whatever online. She's also active on Twitter with the typical posts you'd expect from her community.

I always find Chai's reviews hilarious because she loves purple prose just as much as she likes shitty YA. Her reviews are often super lengthy and half her sentences don't make sense if you actually stop to think about them beyond the *squealing fangirl noises*.

Here's the first sentence from a random sample of her reviews : "Reading the first couple chapters, the strength of my delight, the speed with which it flowered, shocked me."

"Sorcery of Thorns burned through my initial skepticism, bright as a comet in the night’s sky, piercing me with vicious pleasure. In Rogerson’s luscious prose, Sorcery of Thorns weaves a pleasant spell indeed. This is a vibrant novel, and an unstintingly lush one."

" She isn’t telling a story as much as she is pinning down shards of history with well-aimed throws of a dagger before they could melt into paper like watermarks, gone as soon as the ink dries."

That last one in particular makes me want to pin her down with a well-aimed throw of a dictionary. Dear God. There's so much wrong with this one sentence alone - now imagine the rest of her review. First of all, you can't "pin down a shard". A shard is a piece of broken rock, ceramic, glass etc. You can't say "a shard of paper", so how the fuck would you pin down a "shard".
And how about "paper like watermarks". WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? A watermark is a pattern applied to paper, money or photos, so how would it be "paper like". And "gone as soon as the ink dries" is equally dumb since the whole purpose of watermarks is that they're meant to stay. Anyways, you get the gist.

Oh, and she's all about "aesthetics", like most people on GoodReads.
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Here's her bookshelves, if you were curious.
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And here's another sample of top GoodReads reviews that I thought were funny.
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Edit : And here's one of her posts about Kaz, the protagonist of Six of Crows, the mediocre YA fantasy book everyone seems to love.
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I'll take the risk of making a politically incorrect joke and just say it : bet the violence by men reminds her of her traditional Islamic home.

Her ko-fi is hilarious. It’s essentially just “I’m gay. Support my shopping addiction.” As if you need to own a physical copy of a book to review it. It’s called a library, read it, review it, give it back. All for free!

 

[El Sátiro Sordo]

You should look at the reviews for Kill all Normies by Angela Nagle. It's not rightwingers or pepetards like you might expect, but tumblr snowflakes seething at another leftist. It's gold.

 

[El Sátiro Sordo]

Spoiler: Politisperg is too stupid for Dostoyevsky

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Yes, she is a fan of left-wing political novels and YA shit. How did you know?

Also, while not a "review" per say, I would like to share what is apparently the top quote from the top YA book of 2020.

Profound.

What do you expect from people who read the literary equivalent of the MCU and consider it a masterpiece?

 

[Uzumaki]

Goodreads is like /r/books after it turns 14 and has a political awakening after watching one documentary.

 

[Tealeaf]

Goodreads is like /r/books after it turns 14 and has a political awakening after watching one documentary.

Reddit Books's controversial sort is hilariously... literate. In a bad way. Shoutouts to the highly downvoted of Reddit Fantasy.

 

[Uzumaki]

Reddit Books's controversial sort is hilariously... literate. In a bad way. Shoutouts to the highly downvoted of Reddit Fantasy.

/r/books is a subreddit for book collectors who hate reading. These are people who insist that making a distinction between listening to someone speak and reading is elitist gatekeeping and that Ready Player One will have a place in history on par with the works of Shakespeare. It is beyond parody. It is peak reddit.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

The first paragraph of this review amused me at how stereotypically GoodReads it was, though I guess the rest is standard SJW-duckspeak.

Gwendolyn Kensinger rated it it was ok
tw/cw: racism (challenged), racial slurs, racist microaggressions (challenged), racial segregation, white supremacy (challenged), assault, sexism (challenged), unjust incarceration, gaslighting, abusive relationship (both emotionally and physically), discrimination based on race, gender, and sexual orientation (challenged), homophobia (challenged), forced outing of gay character, hate crimes, attempted murder, blood, PTSD, death of a loved one, drug use (off page), selling drugs

I see what Shusterman was trying to do, but I don't think it was quite so successful.

For trying to tackle racism, homophobia, sexism, etc. I think there was too much time spent with the issues of Katie and Landon (head cheerleader and football quarterback) and what may or may not be happening between them. That is also an important topic, and I do not think it was handled well at all. There were too many issues being addressed without enough impact. That is why personally I am finding it harder and harder to read YA books that tackle issues like these.

I saw another reviewer (https://bit.ly/3pcDBz0) say that it was basically a "white savior narrative where a young, white, straight, popular football player mansplains a lot" and I think it 100% accurate. It was super cringe to read about someone pretending to know or understand the suffering of people of color, queer people, & women because they spent a few days as one.

I did appreciate how Shusterman went the extra mile to write about lesser known events in history, and lesser known people of color, etc. He's writing about the things they don't teach you in history class. The reason it's getting 2 stars is all due to the writing. Shusterman uses all the right words, phrases, sentences, and weaves them together into a masterpiece. I just wish the story itself was more thought out. Maybe a few more rounds of edits would have truly benefitted the message, because as it was it was quite unclear. Although I do think at its core its about empathy and kindness.

Not one fucking syllable about whether or not it was, y'know, a good story. With good characters. And an interesting plot. Apparently this reviewer simply doesn't care about such plebian things.

I'm about halfway through the book. It was quite a compelling read at first, but has largely degenerated into a tedious sermon. It is quite obvious Neal Shusterman wrote it with one eye looking over his shoulder in an attempt to appeal to people like this. And, yeah, I'm amused by the fact that he seems to have largely failed.

If you sort by when the reviews were posted, the Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) are largely critical (unfairly, in my view), and the ones written by people who actually bought the damn book/got it from the library generally favorable (probably a bit too favorable).

and that Ready Player One will have a place in history on par with the works of Shakespeare.

Nah, /r/books on balance dislikes Ready Player One, from what I've seen. Brandon Sanderson, on the other hand...