This week’s prompt: How do you strike a balance between providing enough information to pique readers’ interest without giving away too many spoilers in your reviews?
This is an interesting prompt, because it’s the perennial problem when writing reviews. Here’s the issue. Without sharing all the information about the plot, you can’t really talk about how you felt about the ending, any issues that come up that are tied to plot developments, any relationships that give things away or any ideas you have about what could have been handled differently. Usually I try to phrase things a bit vaguely, sometimes I’ll sacrifice being able to talk about some elements of the story so I don’t give away any spoilers. But it’s so hard to do, especially with books where this really affects my ability to write the review. There have been times where I just couldn’t say what I needed to say without spoilers. If this is the case I do a big, red warning that there’s going to be a spoiler in the review at the very beginning. Then I do big red alerts at the beginning and end of the part of the review that includes the spoiler. It’s not a perfect system, but I can’t think of a better one, because I’m not a good enough coder to be able to hide sections of a review so they’ll only appear if you press a button or something. (If anyone has code for this, I’d love it if you wanted to share because MAN would that make my reviewing life so much easier!)
What about you guys? Do you have a strict no spoilers policy on your reviews? Or do you take the other approach and just say what you need to say? Anyone else out there who tries to do both like I do? Anyone have other ideas of how to manage this?
The Book Blogger Hop is a weekly blog link-up that gives participants a different book-related question to ponder each week, and allows them to share their thoughts, find new blogs to follow and connect with new readers. The Hop was originally created by Jennifer at Crazy for Books and is now hosted by Billy at Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. To see a list of upcoming prompts go here.