Tayari's Blog: Who is Harriet Klausner?

Posted by TayariJones on July 20, 2007 10:59 AM
Filed under The Writing Life

Is she the nicest woman in the book world? A secret agent of Amazon.com? Who knows, but Bloggasm has been looking into it. Kelausner has submitedt more than 12,000 on-line reviews since the year 2000. It seems that most of all her reviews are positive, which sort of hurt my feelings since I thought the 5 stars she gave me on amazon were something special. (Ten stars if you add up the scores for both books.)

Some authors complain that she reads books too quickly-- after all, at 12,000 books in 7 years, she is averaging more than four books a day. I did notice that she mis-identified the character "Kenny" in Leaving Atlanta. She calls him Octavia mother's boyfriend, when Kenny is really the mother's brother. (He is called "Uncle Kenny" throughout the text!)

I wasn't sure if this was due to quick reading or to certain assumptions that people make about working class households, particularly female-headed ones. More than one reviewer made this mistake, although I deliberately didn't give Octavia's mother a boyfriend. I often use this example in my classes to illustrate that sometimes you work really hard to avoid stereoptypes and your readers can put them in for you.

But back to Klausner-- the funny this is that most people are so annoyed that she gives so many positive reviews. I just think of her as the anti-Kirkus. They don't really read the books either, but they procede to slam just about everybody.

(thx ed for the link)

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