I’ve been grappling with this question about book reviews: How would I feel if I got ten thousand horrible 1-star ratings BUT my thriller was a bestseller on multiple lists, was optioned by Hollywood and I’d just landed a 5-book deal with a major publisher?
That’s essentially where author, Jeneva Rose finds herself these days. Her psychological thriller, The Perfect Marriage, has sold 700,000+ copies (across all formats) since it was published in July 2020 by Bloodhound Books, a tiny British publishing house.
It exploded onto the bestseller lists –including Amazon, USA Today, Apple and Barnes & Noble –two years later and stayed there for most of 2022. She signed a deal with a Hollywood production company last Fall. She also signed a five-book contract with Blackstone Publishing for five books over five years.
Laughing All The Way To The Bank?
On the way to those dizzying heights, however, the book also garnered a dizzying number of really, truly horrible reviews. As of last weekend, The Perfect Marriage, had the following number of 1-star ratings and reviews: On Amazon, it had 2,040 such ratings with 602 (1-star) reviews. On Goodreads, it had 7,491 (1-star) ratings with 1,845 such reviews.
The 1-star ratings and reviews (ratings are a simple allocation of stars; reviews include text along with the stars) amounted to 2% of the total ratings and reviews for this book. Jeneva took a couple of those reviewers to task (more on that next week) on Tik Tok, and seemed to enjoy making fun of them. And, why not when she’s sitting pretty, raking in the dollars?
“The Worst Book I’ve Ever Read”
Yet, in my opinion, these 1-star reviews are not of the type an author should just shrug off because she has thousands of 4 and 5-star ratings. The 1-star reviewers of The Perfect Marriage reflect a rarely-seen vitriolic intensity as if the reader/reviewer was writing about someone who had scammed them of their life savings instead of just selling them a bad book.
Readers felt cheated of their time and money especially in those cases where they’d actually paid for the book and not received it through Kindle Unlimited or from the library.
I lost track of the number of reviewers who described it as “the worst book I’ve ever read in my life.”
But A Great Premise?
Personally, I thought the premise was brilliant: A top, hotshot criminal defense attorney, Sarah Morgan, decides to represent her husband, Adam, after he is charged with killing his mistress. Unlike many reviewers who voiced their opinion that a wife wouldn’t be allowed to do that, I had no problem with it.
There is no actual rule or law I know of that would prohibit such representation (no need to get into the weeds here to look at instances where the wife might be removed as counsel) –although it is usually considered unwise to represent spouses in litigation because of the inevitable emotional involvement.
However, there were giant errors elsewhere as to legal procedure — which, in my view, is outrageous in a book that falls into the Amazon category of “legal thriller.”
Google, anybody?
According to the above Amazon bestseller list, Jeneva Rose’s paucity of research didn’t hurt her sales. But it sure did irk thousands of readers after they picked up a copy .
One reader/reviewer summed up most of the blatant legal errors, that many others touched upon, like this:
So Wrong In So Many Ways
Readers critiqued every aspect of the book: the characters ( apparently not one character had any redeeming qualities); the prose, the sophomoric dialog, syntax and spelling errors ; the clear lack of research into geographic locations as well as into legal procedures and homicide investigations; and they pointed to plot holes galore.
Here’s a selection of excerpted 1-star reviews from GR:
“The whole thing is a dumpster fire train wreck from start to finish.. Also, has this person even watched, like, half an episode of literally ANY crime show…? Because she clearly didn’t do any real research into how trials, police investigations, dare I say life, works.”
“…Overall, this book had me realizing that it might not be as hard as I thought to write a book and have it become successful.”
“The fact that it has a huge number of 4 and 5 star reviews has me further suspecting that GR and Amazon reviews are infiltrated with bots… I just couldn’t keep [reading]- not even for a free Kindle Unlimited book.”
“I laughed out loud multiple times at the utter Scooby Doo-ness of the plot lines and dialogue… The dialogue felt lifted from a teenager’s first attempt at fiction writing. The back and forth between the spouses felt like what I came up with playing Barbies in the 6th grade.”
“… There must be a Russian bot farm dishing out 5 stars because no one who has read this – and any other book in their entire life – would think that it even approximates to something like a decent book.”
“The most legally inaccurate book I’ve ever read. I kept saying to myself, “That’s not how this works… If you’re a lawyer or are in any way familiar with law, this book will make you want to gouge your eyes out.”
“It’s like the writer is an alien and just made up how she thought humans behaved and interacted with each other. Also the authors understanding of the law is laughable and I’m wondering what kind of research she did?”
“Why was everyone just slapping each other and calling each other bitch? Did this book ever see an editors desk?”
“The last 2 pages are a monologue where the villain reveals how they committed the crime. Good thrillers weave hints and clues into the story, not explain everything at the end.”
“Every person in this book was an insane caricature and almost every event was a genuinely baffling and distressing misunderstanding of the basic functions of the american legal system”
Caution: Giant Spoiler Below
The ending was universally criticized because the revelation that the wife/hotshot attorney was the killer of her husband’s mistress made no sense whatsoever. Mainly because the wife’s chapters were written throughout the book in the first person, present tense.
Hence, to completely erase the fact –or any hint whatsoever– that she was the killer from all her inner thoughts and reflections was thoroughly bad writing, and a big craft error. It was cheating the reader in the worst way.
“...The big twist was terribly sullied by the fact that the inner dialog of the guilty character completely contradicts the ending of the book.”
“This author clearly thinks a good mystery has an ending that comes out of nowhere with no clues whatsoever..”
“All of those 5-star reviews that gush, ‘I didn’t see the end coming!’ Yeah, that’s because [it] came out of left field… The ending was the author’s deus ex machina.”
“The way the plot twist unfolded was absolute trash. You can’t write a character that thinks one way throughout an entire book — sad her husband is framed, shocked he cheated, wondering who the killer is, wondering if maybe her husband did it, wondering maybe this or that person did it, determined to find the culprit… then come out at the end and say she is the killer.”
Next: How Jeneva Rose got The Perfect Marriage published and onto the bestseller charts — after 500 rejections from agents and publishers.
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