Beware of Good Reviews. Bad Ones, too.

As an author, the danger of reading reviews of your book is that you might actually believe them.

The good ones are easy to agree with, as you strut about your cramped writing room, punctuating your solitary chest-bump with “Yeah, baby, that’s what I’m talkin’ about!” They are even capable of drawing a tear when you discover your work has had some meaningful impact on one of your readers.

The bad ones are simply tough. They can make you feel ten times worse than those good ones make you happy. That’s the risk of sharing your work with others.

Then there are some – oddly, many seem to be by professional critics – which miss the point of the book entirely. Today, I read one which described the outcomes of the characters’ lives in The Beech Tree as “predictable,” as if that was a bad thing.

“Predictable.” Predictable. Yes, upon considerable thought, they are predictable. After all, I didn’t set out to write a mystery, thriller or suspense novel. No twists, turns and switchbacks like an Italian road racing course.

There are no superheroes. No divine intervention. No damsels in distress nor knights in shining armor. There are no characters who rise from nothing to lead armies into battle or sorcerers whose magic saves the day. There are no vampires, or zombies or malformed humanoids living high in the mountains.

It is fiction, not fantasy.

The Beech Tree is a story about real people whose only connection to one another in life was that they had been at the same place – the beech tree – at different times. The characters are everyday people who are faced with challenges just as we all are. Sometimes, they get it right. Other times, they don’t.

Life is predictable. We are born. We live. We die. The path we follow in the meanwhile is what makes the difference.

Life can be hard. It can be heartbreaking. Life can be brutal. It can be unfair. Getting through those heartaches, struggling to find joy and making decisions to stand up against injustice requires courage. For good men and women, though, it is a predictable outcome. And therein lies the triumph in their lives … predictably.

I can live with that description of The Beech Tree. In fact, it’s not bad at all.

The Beech Tree