Tag: Sylvia Massara

Edited: Readers Beware of Unprofessional Authors

Posted February 11, 2011 by Holly in Miscellaneous | 86 Comments

Holly: Today a little birdie sent us a link to this post, Authors Beware of Unprofessional Reviewers (see the title of my post? Clever, right?), in which Sylvia Massara whines about the bad review she received here on our site. I find this extremely amusing because 1) the author already threw a giant hissy fit about the review and 2) she told us she was going to write a blog post to trash our “little blog”. She really showed us, didn’t she?

Look, I understand when authors get angry over bad reviews in which they’re slammed on a personal level. I really do. A book is not its author. So when I see reviews that say things like “this author is a stupid cow” I fully understand the author being pissed. To my knowledge, we have never written one of those reviews here on this site. When we review a book we try to keep it all about the book, not about the author. Even though the authors sometimes make this really hard.

Sylvia Massara contacted us many months ago asking if we’d like to review her book. It sounded like something Rowena would enjoy, so she accepted. Rowena read the book and didn’t care for it. She said so in her review. She explained, in detail, what didn’t work for her and why she was giving it a bad grade. End of story? Apparently not for Sylvia Massara.

I particularly love where she calls us jealous and says we’ve never written anything but a grocery list. First of all, my grocery lists are amazing and beautiful. Y’all would be jealous if I shared them with you. Second, we have written things besides grocery lists..unprofessional reviews. Duh.

I’m not going to continue to justify the review. I don’t think I need to. It pretty much speaks for itself. Unfortunately for her, so do Sylvia Massara’s actions. She’s just made herself look like a giant ass..again. I think it’s probably time for her to move on. Don’t you?

Casee
: I’m rubbing my hands together with glee here. I missed telling Sylvia Massara what an ass she made of herself in the comments of Rowena’s review. I have probably read that review ten times and I still can’t see the how it’s unprofessional. In this new post she actually calls the review trashy. Which made me go read the damn review again (sorry Rowena, but it’s hereby declared the damn review) and did not see any of the things that the author claimed. Rowena was objective. She was not malicious. She stated exactly why she didn’t like the book. Her ire wasn’t directed at the author, but at the character. If anything, I thought the damn review was pretty good. Rowena is nothing if not diplomatic. If anything, Sylvia Massara should consider herself lucky that it wasn’t Holly or I that reviewed the book because our damn review would have been a lot worse.

This part of her post made me smile.

This is why I am warning authors to beware of this kind of reviewer. When you offer your book to be reviewed, first take the time to check out the reviewer. Have a read of some of the reviews they wrote in the past. See if they trashed someone else. Make sure they back up their reviews with facts and objective criticism. I learned my lesson the hard way and didn’t do my research first, as I should have done.

She is warning you (authors) to beware of us. We bad. Make sure you check out this page. Or the “About the Blog” on the sidebar where we let you know that we tell it like it is. You saw that right? Or did you just happen to see a review of a Nalini Singh book that we put of the day you skimmed our blog? One more thing…we don’t have to back up our reviews with shit. All we have to do is tell our readers what we think. If we want, we throw in the why.

Holly ETA: The original post Sylvia Massara put up has been heavily edited and the comments deleted. I thought about re-posting them here so you could all have a go at them if you wanted, but to be honest I’m just too lazy. The lovely ladies over at Book Lovers, Inc are, however, much more industrious. They have posted a copy of Massara’s initial post along with the first 100 comments, including Massara’s now infamous ALL CAPS RANT. Thanks ladies!


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Review: The Other Boyfriend by Sylvia Massara.

Posted November 13, 2010 by Rowena in Reviews | 37 Comments


Rowena’s review of The Other Boyfriend by Sylvia Massara.

Sarah Jamison is on a mission to find a boyfriend for her lover’s partner; and Sarah’s best friend comes to the rescue with an idea so crazy that it just might work. Enter the enigmatic Mike Connor. Sarah hates the man on sight, despite the fact that her body tells her otherwise. Mike Connor is smug and full of himself; but Sarah thinks that with his help, she can finally be with the love of her life.

This book was a really short book and one that I was looking forward to reading. However, I was under the impression that the main character of this story, Sarah was a lot younger than she actually was. By reading the blurb, you would think that Sarah was a young heroine, in her early twenties because the kind of scheme would only come from someone who was young, stupid and very insecure, right? Well, Sarah Jamison is not a young woman of 22 or even 23, 24, 25, hell not even 35…she’s 40. So what’s a 40 year old woman doing playing games like setting up her boyfriend’s girlfriend with someone else so that her boyfriend will finally have the balls to be with her out in the open? I have no freaking clue.

All I can say is that by the time I’m 40, I hope that I’m still not insecure or down in the dumps as much as Sarah was in this book. In the beginning of the book, where we learn all about how Sarah is still hurting from a break up that happened 12 years ago, I knew right then that I probably wasn’t going to like this woman.

And I was right, I just couldn’t like this woman.

She’s pissed that Moira, that’s her lover’s girlfriend, keeps showing up or interrupting when she’s trying to spend some quality time with her cheating lover, Jeffrey. Regardless of how many times his girlfriend is calling or showing up, shouldn’t matter because until your cheating lover breaks up with her, you’re the bitch not her. The thing that ticked me off in the beginning was this part of the story:

“We play this both ways,” Mike explained. “I charm Moira away from Jeffrey, and you make Jeffrey jealous.”

“Jealous? Why do I need to make him jealous?” I was puzzled.

“Don‟t you know anything about men, Sarah?” Even if I didn‟t I certainly wasn‟t going to admit it to Mr. High and Mighty. And to think moments earlier I‟d thought he wasn‟t half bad.

“What are you talking about?” I felt affronted.

“Men don‟t want to have it handed to them on a silver platter, you know. They still like the hunt. So let him fight for you.”

He threw me a confident smile. Of all the conceited, arrogant, condescending things to say! “Listen, Mike, I don‟t know what kind of women you‟re used to, but I love Jeffrey and I‟m not about to play silly “come and get me” games with him. So let‟s stick to doing this my way, and that is to charm Moira.”

What exactly is the whole, “Get Monica’s friend Mike to charm Moira away from Jeffrey” thing if not some silly game? Instead of leaving the dirt bag in the first place and sparing herself a world of hurt in the future, she’s letting herself be drawn into the dumbest game of all. She’s 40 freaking years old, she should know better by now. She should know that if a guy won’t leave his girlfriend to make an honest woman out of you then he doesn’t a) love you and b) doesn’t respect you enough to let you go and find someone who will want to be with you. Also, if it’s been a year that you’ve been seeing this guy and he still hasn’t left his girlfriend…what makes you think he ever will? In all of those 365 days out of the year, he couldn’t find one of those days to break it off with her? I’m sorry but that is not the kind of man anyone should want to be with and that’s also something that I had better know by the time that I’m 40. That’s a lesson that everyone should learn BEFORE, LONG BEFORE they turn 40.

The more that I read this book, the more I thought that Sarah couldn’t possibly be 40 years old. She acted like she was a teenager, a hormonal teenager who needed to get a great big smack on the head of reality. I mean, she’s at party playing stupid games, acting like a damn fool, getting drunk and talking stupid and because I thought Jeffrey was just as stupid as her, I thought they totally deserved each other. She was a total brat to Mike and the longer I read this book, the more I thought, “This reminds me of that one book that I read and reviewed on Book Binge.”

I think Sarah was more bratty than Jill was from the other book. Ugh, every time Mike came into the picture, it was like she got diarrhea of the mouth because she wouldn’t shut up and I always wanted to punch her in the mouth. Then she goes home to visit with her Mom (oh, she’s from the UK) and her Mom, who is like an expert hack, tells her that she hacked into Jeffrey’s email account and caught him in all sorts of lies and after her Mom fills her in on what she did, what he did and how Jeffrey can’t be trusted at ALL, Sarah goes to her old room and starts thinking…

“All this time I had believed that the only thing standing between our happiness was Moira, but now I was no longer sure.”

What do you mean, you’re no longer sure? You better be damn sure of everything under the sun where Jeffrey’s concerned, hello??? Have you not been listening to ANYONE in your life? Yeesh. It was around this part that I started giving up on the story. Of course, I kept reading to see if things would turn around but by the end of Chapter 11, I knew that I was completely and truly done with the story.

After everything she found out about Jeffrey, all it took was one remorseful email for her to run back to Taipei. Mike has flown all over the world to be with her while Jeffrey was too busy swapping flirty emails with Sarah’s Mom but does any of that matter? She still goes back to Jeffrey and that’s when I stopped giving a shit what Sarah did anymore. I couldn’t read this story anymore because my blood pressure was rising and I began loathing Sarah.

So yeah, I couldn’t finish this book and how sad is that since this story was only 96 pages long?

Grade: DNF (2 out of 5 of what I did read)

This book is available from Sylvia Massara. You can buy it here in e-format.


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