That reminds a few weeks ago on ABC2, a show called Blood, Sweat and Tshirts, in which they sent some English people who love fashion to the slums in India and learn how their high end clothes are actually made.
One of the guys kept pushing "Anyone can leave a bad situation" but within about two episodes, he finally realised that for some people, there was NO escape.

Many places don't have opportunities like the 'first world' countries do, so in Watergivers, it wasn't that far from the truth. Having depended on the Rainlords, Stormlords and Cloudmaster for so long, the villagers wouldn't just wake up and have a magical idea for a dam that would save them if ever a Cloud master was to die without an appropriately talented heir. Now that is unbelievable!

I could have probably just said I agree with you instead of ranting, but it's just so much fun! 😛

Whereas a more personal review says things like "I hated (or loved) the way the writer did such and such…"

Trent, from what I see you won't be getting too many bad reviews! But, as Peter says above, there will be some. There always is.

Nyssa, I seem to miss your review of Stormlord Rising. Hmm, dunno how that happened. I shall blame Blogpulse for not picking it up. Many thanks! I shall do a post.

You are right, usually it's a disaster to reply to a review because you don't like the fact that someone didn't like your baby…

The only review of The Last Stormlord that disturbed me was the one that said the world was not believable because people (even apparently poor, illiterate, downtrodden people in deserts where rain became more and more rare as time went by) would never have put up with the situation. They would have turned on the people who dominated them by supplying them with water. The would have DONE something. I felt like writing a scathing reply, but didn't.

It upset me not because he didn't like my book – that's fair enough – but because it showed such a skewed view of our world. e.g. Dafur is the fault of the poor villagers. Why don't they, the villagers, DO something? The Australian indigenous people were not clever for evolving water-saving strategies, they should have built dams instead, or SOMETHING.
What or how, with limited resources, I have no idea…so that review to me was deeply disturbing. It reduced poverty and oppression down to the fault of the poor and the oppressed.

Trudi, I seem to have a vague memory of Voyager at one time or another putting up a teaser of our books that did just that – beginnings and endings of chapters? Or am I misremembering?

Double hilarious that anyone would even consider reviewing a book on the basis of that!!

Good on you Jo! I notice that Good Reads reviews are a breed apart – they are usually written by real book lovers, and are very critical and very personal. i.e. they don't try to write a review for the general public of the kind "if you liked X you will like this book" type. It's more a "this is my personal reaction to this book and I'm going to be very honest" review.

Blog reviewers tend to take a broader view, as they try to tell their readers whether THEY will like/not like the book.

On Amazon you can get anything at all. Even folk who will give you one star because it's not available yet!

Don't think so.

All readers have peferences, religous baggage, peer pressure, bulletin boards, internet reviews, favourite genre authors etc which all contribute to colour their reading experience.

By the way, I just voted in a poll about The Last Stormlord on Goodreads. I voted you a 10 of course, whatever anyone else might say, I think your books are great. As do a couple of my friends I might say.

After some puzzling over this, I figured out the reviewer must have read the first and last page of each chapter. It was the only way I could see anyone getting these plot points so wildly wrong.

And just wanted to also add: never, ever whinge about a bad review online and publically – it makes the writer look like a whingey brat. It's really unprofessional.

Although the one time it is okay to respond to a review is if the reviewer has misunderstood something. One of my reviewers was emailed by Kevin J Anderson himself, when he got a bit confused over the Dune timeline. Another reviewer had written that something was self-published, when it wasn't. But that was through private email, not complaining on your blog to the world 😛

I do hope you read my reviews though, Glenda 😉 Loooooooooove the Watergivers series!