Reviews of books

What is covered in this brochure?

You can use this guide to create a book review, a report, or an essay that provides a critical analysis of a text. It provides a method and makes some recommendations for writing book reviews.

Describe the review.

A review analyzes a text, circumstance, thing, or phenomenon. Reviews can cover anything from articles to books to whole literary fields or genres to restaurants, policies, exhibitions, concerts, and a wide variety of other things. The subject of this presentation will be book reviews. See our literature review handout for more information on a project like this.

A review argues, first and foremost. The fact that a review is a commentary and not just a summary is its most crucial component. It enables interaction and discussion with the piece’s author and other audiences. You can express agreement or disagreement and point out any knowledge, judgments, or organizational flaws you think the work has. Your statement should be concise and communicate your opinion of the subject matter. It should also likely follow the format of other academic writing assignments, including a thesis statement, body paragraphs that support it, and a conclusion.

Reviews typically don’t last long. They rarely go over 1000 words in newspapers and academic journals, while longer assignments and prolonged commentary are possible. In either scenario, reviews must be brief. They differ in theme, tone, and style but have some things in common as well:

A review firstly provides the reader with a summary of the material. This covers the topic’s pertinent description, overarching viewpoint, justification, or objective.

A review provides a critical evaluation of the material, which is second and more significant. This incorporates your responses to the work being evaluated, including what stands out to you, whether you found it to be convincing or not, and how it improved your comprehension of the topics at hand.
A review typically advises whether or not the audience would find it appealing in addition to examining the work.