As both a writer and a reader, I disapprove of this practice. Then there’s the rating without a review. But doesn’t this muddy the reviewing waters and mislead potential readers who pay more attention to ratings? Even if the review points out problems with the book, the rating is benign. One idea is to decouple the star rating from the review. How dare I equate all these books with a number? Imagine rating your friends that way! Sometimes I look at my list of 4-star books and realize how different they are from one another, in quality, genre, and voice. I assign 4 stars more often than any other rating. If 1 and 2 stars are avoided, that leaves only three ratings: 3 stars (OK), 4 stars (good), 5 stars (excellent). Sure, but if a book is badly written, doesn’t it deserve a bad rating? This is the opposite of the malicious attack. Many reviewers avoid 1- and 2-star ratings. But many potential book buyers (including libraries) use a book’s star rating as an indicator of quality when deciding to buy or not. It has been used for malicious attacks, in which a group assigns a bunch of 1-star ratings to a book in order to pull down its overall rating. It’s a blunt instrument, reducing the worth of a complex piece of writing to a number. One of these is the familiar 5-star system used on Amazon, Goodreads, and by many individual reviewers. Sometimes I have reservations about the whole process. I read a lot of books and write some sort of review about almost all of them. A recent post by a fellow writer inspired me to revisit it. I just read over them, but didn’t think I’d finished with the topic. Since I started blogging, I’ve written at least half a dozen posts about book reviewing, the most recent ones in 2019. It’s quite possible I skimmed over or ignored mentions of these plants’ less desirable qualities. Especially if the plant was native to my region native plants are always good. If an author conveyed their enthusiasm about a plant in eloquent prose, I was convinced. When I was making this garden in the early 1990s, the internet was just getting going. Not true it will grow in bone dry soil once established, but it does need good drainage. It claims the plant needs “moist but well-drained” soil. The site makes casual mention of suckers, recommending that they be removed if one does not want the plant to naturalize (which means “take over”). Hah! The oldest parts of mine are more than 10 feet tall, and I’ve dug up their suckers several yards from the parent plant. One web site describes Mahonia aquifolium as growing 3 to 6 feet tall with a 2 to 5 foot spread. I think the Mahonia is also an RHS award winner. Snowberry ( Symphoricarpos albus) and Oregon Grape ( Mahonia aquifolium) are both touted as gardenworthy native plants, deer- and drought-proof, BUT both sucker like mad and aren’t suitable for small gardens unless situated so sucker control is doable.
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