The practical answer first, since you came here for one and I am not a monster.
A useful review runs about two hundred words. Say what the book is trying to do, say whether it did it, and say who would want it. Name one specific thing: a scene, a sentence, a decision the author made that you noticed. Specifics are the whole business. "I loved it" tells a stranger nothing except that you are in a good mood, and I have no way of knowing how long that will last. Do not retell the plot. The plot is already in the book. If you dislike a book, say so plainly and say why, and leave the author's character out of it, since you have not met him and, on the available evidence, would not enjoy it.
Stars: give the book the number that matches what you actually felt an hour after finishing, not the number you felt on the last page, which is a different and more excitable number.
That is the advice. It is good advice. I would like it noted that I gave it before anything else, because what follows is a letter, and I have been told that a letter should begin with something the reader can use.
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am dead. I want that established at the top so we do not spend the middle of this letter working up to it. I have been dead since 1910, and I was in no particular hurry to take on further employment, and yet here I am at a desk in a building I did not select, in the year 1997, which this establishment observes the way other places observe a religion.
My duties are reviews. Not the writing of them. The receiving. Somebody long ago put a wooden tray on this desk and painted the word REVIEWS on it in a hand I would call optimistic, and I have been beside that tray ever since, and I will tell you what goes in it: nothing. In twenty-nine years, nothing. The tray is empty. The tray has always been empty. I dust it on Sundays out of respect for the concept.
What is not empty is the hallway. That is the reason for this letter.
They come in all day. Strangers. They arrive at a considerable clip, mostly between nine in the morning and one in the afternoon, and every one of them has the same face on, which is the face of a person who was going somewhere specific and has arrived somewhere else and has not admitted it yet. They stand in the entry. They look at the walls. They say, to nobody, "this isn't it," in a tone of voice I have come to know better than my own name.
I have asked them who sent them. They do not know. I have asked them what they expected. They say they expected to leave a review, and I point at the tray, and they look at the tray, and something goes out of them, and then most of them sit down anyway.
Now. I have written a great deal in my life about human folly and I flatter myself I know it when it is standing in front of me, and this is not folly. This is a current. Something is moving people through that door the way a river moves a log, and the log does not consult a map, and I have stopped asking the log to explain itself. But I would like the record to show that I have inquired, repeatedly, in writing, of the management, and the management is a man named Doug who is at the lake.
He is always at the lake. I have gone out there twice. Both times he was standing at the end of a dock with his back to the building and his hands in his pockets, looking at the water like it owed him an apology, and both times I said, Doug, there are people in the hallway, and both times he said, without turning around, "there always are," and then he said nothing further for eleven minutes, and I am dead and I could not outlast him.
The lake, I should say, does not appear on any county survey. I have checked. Marigold checked before me and made a note of it in the Ledger, in green ink, in a hand that got smaller toward the end of the sentence.
Since the tray is empty and I am paid in nothing, I have taken the liberty of writing the reviews myself. Not of books. Of the arrivals. It seemed a fair trade. A sample, lightly edited:
Woman, Tuesday, brown coat, four stars. Came in fast, stopped hard, read the wall for six minutes, said "huh," took her coat off. Strong second act. Did not leave when she meant to.
Man, Wednesday, phone in hand, two stars. Never looked up. Left in ninety seconds. I am not going to pretend that was a good visit for either of us, but I hold it against the current, not the man.
Boy of about nine, Thursday, five stars, the only five I have given. Asked me directly whether I was real. I said I had been having the same argument with myself for a century. He said, "same," which I understand is a word now, and then he sat on the floor by the radiator and read for two hours off a shelf he chose without help. He took nothing. He came back Friday. He is the finest reviewer in the building because he reviews with his whole body: he sits down or he does not.
That is the standard, if you want one. Whatever you write, write it like a man who sat down.
You may leave your review in the tray. It will be the first. I will read it aloud in the reading room, which is a thing I do at four o'clock for an audience of dust and one draft that has been winning arguments in this hallway since before I got here.
But if you do not have a review, and you only have the feeling of being somewhere you did not intend, then I will tell you what I tell the ones in the brown coats: the building is warm, the chairs are real, and an author somewhere is a fragile organism who would be measurably improved by a sale. Buy a book. Read it. Then write two hundred words about it, with one specific thing in them, and put it wherever you like. It does not have to come here. Almost nothing does, and yet look at all of you.
We keep a fuller accounting of who wanders in and why over at Lost & Found, and if you are still trying to work out what this place is supposed to be, the standing explanation is at What Is a Booktrovert?, and I am told it clarifies less than it promises.
Irritably, but sincerely,
Booktrovert #2193