Stephanie Gayle

It's funny. I was just reading a lot of articles on bad reviews by authors, including a recent post by Jennifer Crusie. How to react to them: general consensus is don't react publicly no matter how incensed you are about the review. How to treat them: as one person's opinion. And today I discover that amid the very nice reviews my editor has been sending me there is a bad review, which she did not send me. I've been pestering the very handsome boyfriend to look it up for me via Harvard's library database because MIT doesn't carry the magazine that has the review.

So I just got email from him in which tells me he doesn't think I need to see the review as it isn't "exactly constructive" and it also "isn't pretty." By that I think he means "it's awful, horrible and it's going to hurt you to look at it." He's right to advise me not to look, but I'm not sure I can. I want to see how bad it is. I told him to send it along and promised him I'd turned on pandacam so that as soon as I finished reading I could get a dose of panda calm. Truly, Tai Shan is like opium. Soothing, soothing panda.

I'll let you know whether a panda can trump review rage soon!

UPDATE: I got the review. I read it. I thought, "Man alive. That reader really didn't like my book." I felt a little sad, but not truly gut-punched sad. It's a bad review, no doubt. But I don't buy what the reviewer is selling, just as the reviewer didn't buy my story. I guess we call it a draw.

Panda is still cuter than ever.

When the very handsome boyfriend sent the bad review, as I ordered him to, he also sent me PDFs of three very positive reviews to act as a chaser. So thoughtful.