I was thinking recently about negative reviews, spurred partly by Charles Payseur's post on the topic and by the recent Critical Friends episode featuring Aisha Subramanian, Dan Hartland, and Abigail Nussbaum. All these people are much more prolific reviewers than me, but I want to talk about my own experience, because I think when your reviews have a special purpose like Autistic Book Party’s - boosting good representation, calling out and dissecting bad representation - it changes things slightly.

(This is not to suggest that the reviewers above don't think about social justice or representation. Clearly they do! But there's a difference between writing reviews that happen to include that component, and writing an entire blog about representation, often to the exclusion of other topics.)

I do fewer negative reviews these days than I used to. Not none. But fewer.