Sad Books Say So Much

Negative reviews are totally unacceptable but comments like this are?

"Nenia - I'm not familiar with your reviews in general, but you wrote a truly terrible (ignorant and mean spirited) review of Anthem for Jackson Dawes on Good Reads, in which you confessed to judging it by comparison with The Fault in Our Stars (no, of course it wasn't written to 'cash in' - it happened to coincide with the UK edition - more's the pity - and it's hardly an untapped genre), in which you happily confessed to not having bothered to read it, and in which you decided the 14 year-old main character was a bitch because one emotional response she had to her first day on a cancer ward was to resent someone she (wrongly) took to be healthy. What an extraordinary lack of insight and compassion on your part. The author wrote about this subject, not as a cheap device to get her readers hooked, but because she has personal knowledge of it. Reviewers, just like authors, have a degree of power and responsibility. Judging from this review (and admittedly, only this one) you don't have the moral maturity to do this job, so please stop." *

*My bolding for emphasis.

To be fair, the person who left this comment on my blog deleted it. Maybe they had second thoughts. As a nod of respect to that, I have withheld the name.

But what this person doesn't appear to have realized is that my email notification preserves the text in whole. So after I get all excited that someone commented on my blog, only to find comments like this, well. That just sucks.

I am posting this to raise awareness to the fact that the abusive comments we see are just the tips of the iceberg. Lots of abuse goes on behind the scenes. And even when the proof of it gets erased, that has no impact on its effects on the inside of the person who received it.