Six Tips on How to Write a Book Review Essay

Reading is an essential part of our lives that demands plenty of thoughtful approaches depending on what we read. Plus, the process of reading may well be considered as an intimate activity that unifies a person with nature or another spiritual world.

However, different, yet no less crucial feelings writing might bring, especially if you write about what you have read.

Book reviews are great ways to check your command of a language and how you perceive a specific story. To fully endorse you with writing a book review, we have compiled a list of top-notch tips; have a look at them!

Lure the Audience

First and foremost, you have to attract, tempt readers to keep on reading the essay. And to do that, use some tricks, such as a “hook” that will catch your audience’s attention and make them read it instead of scrolling past it. The hook has to be cogent or even provocative sentence, in some sense. For instance, you can even make the hook as a question: “Ever wondered how Jack Kerouac made hitchhiking a cult and left his footprint in the history of travel?

Suffice to say, there is a variety of ways to make your hook seductive. Check some cheap custom essays, and you will find out that hooks can be written in a different manner.

General Book Information

Give any essential pieces of information regarding the book that you think might be useful for readers to know. Indubitably, the title and author are unavoidable.

You can shed some light on the critique the author received about the book and why it is so ubiquitous or underrated. If you have a knack for doing research, you can conduct one and see whether there are any things that had an impact on the story.

Sometimes, the readers are eager to know why such a short story had been creating for years.

Describe In a Nutshell

Tell the audience what the book you have read is about. But omit to give any spoilers or unveiling plot twists. Having said that, try to eschew to write in detail about anything that occurs from the middle of the book, including the climax, onwards.

It would be reasonable to say that a plot has an “unexpected twist” rather than disclosing “his son will stab the protagonist!” If the book comprises diverse parts, it might be useful to mention this, saying whether you consider reading other books in the series to understand this one.

If you write a book review for some website, it is possible to hide them, sign “spoiler alert,” and make it only visible for those who desire to see it. However, we wouldn’t recommend it for the reason that a plethora of websites already provides a synopsis for each and every story.

Tell What You Liked About the Book

In order to say what you liked the most about the story, try answering a couple of the following questions, which will help you prioritize the most significant things you adored:

■ The pool of characters; which one you liked the most and why?

■ Among them, who felt real to you and how it manifested?

■ Were you baffled by events, or it didn’t seem hard to guess?

■ Part of the book and story you liked the most, and why?

■ Was there an abundance of types of scenes? (sad scenes, hilarious, tense, etc.)

■ Were you experiencing only bad/ only good emotions, or was it ambivalent?

■ Finally, were you gripped throughout the entire book, or were there moments you would rather skip?

Tell What You Disliked

Since you have mentioned the aspects that positively influence you, you have to balance it with the things you didn’t like, so that it doesn’t look like an artificial and utopian story.

To give readers a clear picture of what you disapproved, ensure answering these questions:

■ Was the story a pure cliffhanger that only made it disappointing? Justify your opinion shortly.

■ Was the protagonist in a haze so that it was extremely hard to track/ care about him/her?

■ Do you think there were any motives for doing that, or was it more like a lack of inspiration/ideas of the author?

■  To your mind, were there any self-contradictory situations that detrimentally affected the story?

Encapsulate the Review

To put it in other words, let your readers know the conclusions. Who is this book the most appropriate for? Why do you think that, for instance, cognitive biases will push away people in their forties from reading it while the youth will admire it? What driving factors do you think made the admiration of the book skyrocket?

Indeed, no author of the book review avoids giving a star rating system. Establish the gradation and provide the audience your grade concerning the book.

Certainly, explain what made you give such a rating and what little, annoying things were a pain in the arse that substantially diminished the rating.

The same goes for things that made the overall grade soar. But remember that every writer is a human, thus don’t exaggerate with your critique. 

Last but not least, barring content, you have to pay close attention to the word count as well as the syntax, lexicon, and the overall coherence of the essay.

A review that has dozens of errors can’t be taken earnestly. Make sure that not only will you polish your essay in terms of content, but also in terms of grammar and lexicon.

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