A while ago, a friend called to ask if I would write an Amazon customer review of her new book.

“Can there be any doubt in your mind?” I was the first reader for many of her short stories. I was happy to write the review.

But then it turned out her (small) publisher was also on the line, and I had no idea why.  Good God!  Was this a legal arrangement?

I gave her book a five-star review.  All of her friends did.  I don’t think anyone else ever found out about the book.

Such is the fate of small-press books.

Tonight I idly wondered how the classics are faring in customer reviews.  Tolstoy gets four out of five stars for Anna Karenina.  Charlotte Bronte gets four stars for Villette.

Tough reviewers!

Then I looked up 20 of my favorite contemporary writers, 10 women and 10 men.  Ann Beattie got an average of 2.5 stars for her gorgeous experimental novel, Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life.

The 10 women I looked up fare on the average slightly better than the 10 men.  The women’s average star rating is 3.74.  The men’s average is 3.66

Sherman Alexie and Alice Hoffman have the highest ratings:  4.3 stars.

Not a big enough sample, though, is it?

Eighteen out of the 20 on my list are fiction, because this reflects my personal reading habits.  I would give five stars to every one of these books.

Here are my (unprofessional) stats.  (Any errors are due to my calculator.:))

10 Contemporary Women’s Books (in alphabetical order)

Ann Beattie’s Mrs. Nixon, 2.5 stars
Margaret Drabble’s The Pure Gold Baby, 3.4 stars
Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, 4.2 stars
Alice Hoffman’s The Museum of Extraordinary Things, 4.3 stars
A. M. Homes’ May We Be Forgiven, 3.7
Michelle Huneven’s Off Course, 4.1 stars
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s A Lovesong for India, 4.2 stars
Alice Kessler-Harris’s A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman, 3.3 stars
Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, 4.1 stars
Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings, 3.6 stars

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10 Contemporary Men’s Books (in alphabetical order)

Sherman Alexie’s Blasphemy, 4.3 stars
Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, 3.4 stars
Jim Crace’s Harvest, 4.1 stars
Clyde Edgerton’s Night Train, 3.6 stars
Howard Jacobson’s Zoo Time,  2.8 stars
Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale, 4.1 stars
Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s The Watch, 4.2 stars
Peter Stothard’s Alexandria:  The Last Nights of Cleopatra, 3.5 stars
D. J. Taylor’s Ask Alice, 2.8 stars
Steve Yarbrough’s The Realm of Last Chances, 3.9 stars

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I am so accustomed to reading between the lines of EVERYTHING, reviews, articles, blogs, you name it, that a few pages of the sample influences me more than any opinions.

There are some very thoughtful reviews, as well as cranky ones, and I love the idea of consumers saying what they want to say.

But there are problems, of course:  trolls, “sock puppets” (writers under other names raving about their own books and attacking other people’s), and, though I’m not sure if this is still the rule, writers are or were forbidden to comment on other writers in their genre.

And the star ratings can be a bit disconcerting. I never think star ratings are quite fair.   It’s a shock to see an award winner, Howard Jacobson’s Zoo Time, with a 2.8.

Better to read the text of the consumer reviews than look at the stars.