A Christmas Carol

by Charles Dickens, E. M. Forster, Hanya Yanagihara · 1843

##### [Blog](https://reedsy.com/discovery/blog "Blog") – Posted on Friday, Mar 29 # 17 Book Review Examples to Help You Write the Perfect Review  It’s an exciting time to be a book reviewer. Once confined to print newspapers and journals, reviews now dot many corridors of the Internet — forever helping others discover their next great read. That said, every book reviewer will face a familiar panic: _how can you do justice to a great book in just a thousand words?_ As you know, the best way to learn how to do something is by immersing yourself in it. Luckily, the Internet (i.e. [Goodreads and other review sites](https://reedsy.com/discovery/blog/book-review-sites), in particular) has made book reviews more accessible than ever — which means that there are a lot of book reviews examples out there for you to view! In this post, we compiled **17 prototypical book review examples** in multiple genres to help you figure out [how to write the perfect review](https://reedsy.com/discovery/blog/how-to-write-a-book-review). If you want to jump straight to the examples, you can skip the next section. Otherwise, let’s first check out what makes up a good review. _Are you interested in becoming a book reviewer? We recommend you check out_[ _Reedsy Discovery_](https://reedsy.com/discovery/) _, where you can earn money for writing reviews — and are guaranteed people will read your reviews!_[_To register as a book reviewer, sign up here._](https://reedsy.com/discovery/reviewers/apply?source=db) **_Pro-tip_ : **But wait! How are you sure if you should become a book reviewer in the first place? If you're on the fence, or curious about your match with a book reviewing career, take our quick quiz: 🖋️ ### Should you become a book reviewer? Find out the answer. Takes 30 seconds! Start quiz ## What must a book review contain? Like all works of art, no two book reviews will be identical. But fear not: there are a few guidelines for any aspiring book reviewer to follow. Most book reviews, for instance, are less than 1,500 words long, with the sweet spot hitting somewhere around the 1,000-word mark. (However, this may vary depending on the platform on which you’re writing, as we’ll see later.) In addition, all reviews share some universal elements, as shown in our [book review templates](https://reedsy.com/discovery/blog/book-review-template). These include: 1. A review will offer a concise plot summary of the book. 2. A book review will offer an evaluation of the work. 3. A book review will offer a recommendation for the audience. If these are the basic ingredients that make up a book review, it’s the tone and _style_ with which the book reviewer writes that brings the extra panache. This will differ from platform to platform, of course. A book review on Goodreads, for instance, will be much more informal and personal than a book review on Kirkus Reviews, as it is catering to a different audience. However, at the end of the day, the goal of all book reviews is to give the audience the tools to determine whether or not they’d like to read the book themselves. Keeping that in mind, let’s proceed to some book review examples to put all of this in action. 📚 ### How much of a book nerd are you, really? Find out here, once and for all. Takes 30 seconds! Start quiz ## Book review examples for fiction books Since story is king in the world of fiction, it probably won’t come as any surprise to learn that a book review for a novel will concentrate on **how well the story was told**. That said, book reviews in all genres follow the same basic formula that we discussed earlier. In these examples, you’ll be able to see how book reviewers on different platforms expertly intertwine the plot summary and their personal opinions