In all the years I’ve been writing I’ve never, ever written a book review. For some reason, the thought of writing one terrifies me. Whether it’s the idea of writing about a book without giving away major pieces of the plot or – even worse – the ending, or whether it’s the notion of writing a factual piece about a work of fiction, I don’t know. Every time a book review competition has come up, I’ve managed to be ‘too busy’ to write the few hundred words required.
But this is about to change.
Sheila held a book review workshop this week and I went along. Of course, I was ‘too busy’ to write anything for it but lots of other members made the effort and produced pieces to read out. (I’m sure I wasn’t the only one scribbling down some very interesting titles to follow up later.)
And I discovered there are worse things than having to write a book review. We could have had to write a book review in Africaans, like Lorraine. ‘Das Goed’ was apparently not enough of a review to merit a pass.
Our resident experts, Catherine and Alison, both winners of the SAW book review competition, read out their winning entries to show us how it should be done.
After a discussion about the actual competition and the use of pseudonyms, Wilma thought Catherine or Alison would be good pseudonyms to use!
Sheila kept us on track throughout the evening and a list of her tips and hints has been sent round the Google Group . And even better, she has inspired me to enter the book review competition this year.
Janice Johnston