My Reaction to My First One-Star Review

I knew it would happen eventually – a one-star review for Saint Peter Killed God on Amazon.

I’ve been begging Christians to give me low reviews saying things like, “I just don’t agree with the premise that Christianity must change.”  I must have asked a dozen people, but they were all too polite.  So when the reviewer said that obviously my friends had stacked the reviews in my favor, I saw his point.  My book needs some balance in its reviews.  Having ten nice reviews to one bad one, well, that’s pretty good odds and I deserved to be called on it.

Most of the review I can live with.  Skipping pages to get to what was happening in the psych hospital, etc. – all fine.  The one thing that got me was the claim of grammatical mistakes.

I recently got into an argument with a blogger.  He asked for my permission to post a review blasting my book for its horrible punctuation.  He didn’t know the rule about speeches.  It’s kind of an odd grammatical rule.  If you have one person speaking for more than one paragraph, there are no end quotes at the end of the paragraph but new quotes at the beginning of the next one.  I remember learning about that rule when I read To Kill a Mockingbird.  Atticus Finch closing remarks are punctuated that way. 

I wonder how many people even know that rule.

The blogger finally figured it out and apologized.

And I wonder if that’s why the reviewer gave me one star.  Did he not know the rule?  I say that because he blasted my book – and yes, I’m sure there might be errors within the book.  But nothing that warrants such criticism (I did panic when it was first published and my wife caught more than a dozen errors – after it was edited twice professionally).   And while this review doesn’t make me panic, it does frustrate me.