Whoa, someone out-AmeliaJaked AmeliaJake*. I don’t usually write book reviews because reading is such an individual activity, and because I wrote enough of them in school. Occasionally, I will feel obligated to comment that a book is really bad, unless you want to read for the purpose of finding a way to transfer an emotional need to barf into an actual one.

However, I just finished reading a review of a book that most readers agreed was a “good story” but also agreed with one long-winded and nit-picking reviewer about the exact use of words regarding it being women’s historical fiction about someplace in the South. Yes, the capitalized South. Heavens to Betsy, that one Southern Belle took the author to task for every little nuance, citing the fact that she had lived in that area and, by God, it wasn’t exactly the way she had understood the language of the area and era.

It was a STORY set in an historical time. From what I could tell, the gist of the background was correct, it was just these little miscues that were a sin against people’s eyeballs, not to mention minds. It was not a historical scholarly paper. Most of the people who thanked the lady for dissecting the writing, mentioned that they were also from that exact area. Yeah, they said, he was a good story but, uh, you can’t make a verb a noun in that part of the country.

There are a lot of little piranhas out there in reviewerland and to mix a metaphor, some of them deliver their bites with the annoying, repetitive knocking of a woodpecker at two o’clock in the morning.

* AJ can be scathing, as those who witnessed her “dud” analysis a few years back. Gee, reminding myself of that day, I feel as if I am back in the car, spouting off, “Dud! What a dud. A real dud. A dud. Dud!!!!” And that was before we had even cleared the parking lot.