How to write a Book Review - By Felicia
Hi everyone! Today, I will show you how to write the perfect book review, just like the book reviews I do.
The first step in writing a successful book review is, well, to find a book! The example I am using is the book “Last Day On Mars” by Kevin Emerson. Find the final result here.
The second step is to form a topic sentence for the book review. I use a format which I learned at school: the IVF sentence. IVF stands for Item, Verb, Finish (your thought). My school gave me a template: The novel, “[name of book]”, by [author], [verb] the story of [what happens].
What I did was: The novel, “Last Day On Mars”, by Kevin Emerson, tells the story of two kids, Liam and Phoebe who live on Mars. The sun is going supernova in a few days, and they must get off Mars as fast as possible.
The third step is to bookmark, highlight, and annotate the key points and/or the main events of the book. “Last Day On Mars” has 325 pages, and I came up with around 45 main ideas, which averages around to one event per 7 pages. This is way too much, which brings me to the fourth step.
The fourth step is to filter out some key points, just so the book review is not too long. This then left me with 25 key points, or around one point per 13 pages. This is just enough for a good book review.
The fifth step is to write down all the main events in note form. I did this in a separate Google Slides. Using one bullet point per main idea, I got it all down to 2 slides. This gives me the basic frame for how I want to write my book review.
The sixth and optional step is to delete the main events at the end. You might want to do this so as to not reveal the ending to the readers. However, I prefer not doing this step because I prefer writing fuller and more detailed book reviews that include every aspect of the book. It is your decision to do this step or not.
The seventh step is to actually write the whole paragraph. Writing the whole paragraph is actually the easiest step of the process, as all the facts are written down already. Your job is just to rewrite and paraphrase them. All in all, this gave me two Google Docs pages of writing, single-spaced with a font size of 12.
The eighth step is to add a short, five- to seven-sentence paragraph about your opinion on the book. The three main things for this kind of opinion paragraph are:
Features (Suspense? Too long/short?)
Genre (Science fiction? Fantasy?)
Rating (5/5? 4/5?)
The ninth and final step is to correct and enrich the text. I started by adding adjectives to every noun possible, and using thesaurus.com to replace commonly used words like “kind” and “interesting”.
And that’s it! Thank you for reading this article about writing an article. Again, if you would like to read my final review of the book “Last Day On Mars”, please check it out here!
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