Bad Reviews

I see this morning that Bonnie Cehovet has written another lackluster review for one of my books.

I expected it. Bonnie is a prolific reviewer, and I think she writes about every tarot book on the market. Yet she’s never written anything kind or thoughtful about my work … because Bonnie Cehovet doesn’t really review books.

Instead, she reviews tables of contents.

A typical Bonnie Cehovet review opens with her first impression of the subject matter: when she reviewed my book Tarot Journaling, for example, she started by describing her first “horrible thought” about the premise of my work:

Noting the use of the Celtic Cross (a traditional Tarot spread), I had the horrible thought that each journal entry was meant to be a complete Celtic Cross reading (which would mean using a ten or eleven card base, depending upon whether the reader chose to read with a significator or not). Fortunately, this was not true.

At the time, I didn’t know how to respond to that. I still don’t. Is it really fair to criticize a book based on a your own bias and preconceptions?

For Bonnie, apparently it is — because she opened her review of my new book in the same way.

I do not like to hear the word “fortunetelling” used in conjunction with the Tarot. If someone came up to me and said: “I understand that you read the Tarot. Would you tell my fortune for me?”, they could be assured that I would not read for them. I am decidedly NOT a fortune teller!

Luckily, we don’t have to dwell too long on Bonnie’s assessment of the topic itself, because her review rolls right into her usual format: a complete and total rehash of the table of contents.

She presents her recitation as though she’s developing the material herself, with a chapter-by-chapter description of everything in the book. Despite the fact that she found the structure of my guide “annoying,” she managed to compile 10 paragraphs of her review simply by outlining the material in my work.

That’s 10 paragraphs out of 13, total, in her review.

I always feel a little used after I read Bonnie’s reviews. I keep hoping she’ll come up with her own material, rather than appropriating my table of contents as if she gave birth to it herself. I keep hoping she’ll critique my books based on their merits, rather than on her misconceptions. I keep hoping that she’ll offer a thoughtful assessment of the books I’ve actually written, rather than a description of the books she would have written in my place. And I keep hoping she’ll conclude her reviews with something more than a “meh” that I can practically hear from my living room in Minnesota.

But then again, that might take some work, and it’s a lot easier to criticize than it is to create.