The debate/argument/discussion of the role of the reviewer continues.

Vanessa Garcia wrote a less than positive review of Kathleen Rooney’s memoir For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs. The review has ignited, via the comments section, a debate on the reviewer’s responsibility.

Here’s one comment from Daniel Nester:

Bottom line: People think the review is a shitty one and are reacting to it. We’re having a pretty smart comments conversation–smarter than anything the reviewer said in the actual article–over why and how such a shitty review would be written and how it could be published. We can only guess to the reviewer’s motivations, but my guess is that it’s not an entirely unsophisticated reviewer, one who knows all the implications of genre and gender yadda yadda yadda, and went ahead and wrote a shitty review anyway.

People are also questioning whether a review of a memoir should talk about the author’s motivations. One commenter thinks so: “A memoir is very definitely an invitation to “delve into” the author’s brain the way he or she has written it.”

Follow the whole thing here.

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