Book Reviewing Basics

It's been awhile since I've offered my online course for beginning book reviewers, and I can't say it's looking as though I'll be able to return to that particular virtual classroom anytime soon. Luckily, though, Don Noble's "Kind and Balanced: Four Lessons Toward the Well-crafted Book Review" offers some terrific pointers for everyone I've left in the lurch. His article is much more focused on the actual writing than the marketing of your reviews (and he's also a self-declared prose specialist, so the article will be less useful to those who wish to develop their skills in reviewing poetry books). Bonus: Noble discusses how to review anthologies. I think it's well worth downloading the Spring 2008 issue of First Draft (a publication of the Alabama Writers Forum) to read it.