How to write a book report well

The most common mistake that is made when writing about the plot in a book report is simply reiterating the storyline. This will not get you the best grades. When you write about the plot, you need to critically analyse it. This means that you are searching for two ways to write about the story. The first way is to look for reasons why you like the story. One of the best ways to measure a book’s success is if it reaches truthfulness. This doesn’t mean that you believe in Hobbits; it means that while you were reading the book, you were truly engaged with the story and even if it was about Hobbits, it echoed the human experience. If you could not find any holes in what happened in the plotline, then you can write about that in a critical manner. Writing in a critical manner does not have to be negative; it can also be positive.

The second way to critically comment on a novel is to point out the flaws in the storyline. Often students choose to always write book reports on books that they love. Although this can be enjoyable, it is actually great fun to write about a book that you have loathed. The main point to remember here though is that you can’t simply state that you hated it, you have to have good evidence from the text that it is a flawed piece. Remember, just because books are deemed classics doesn’t mean that they are all perfect pieces of writing. There are many flaws to be found in the plotlines of lots of books, you simply need to view them with a critical eye. For instance, if after reading William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’, you didn’t believe that the school boys would have survived both the plane wreckage and living on a desert island without adults and all the infighting, providing you can find evidence to back up your assertions, you could put that in your report.

For many readers, it is the characters that truly make the books. So how do we write about them in a book report? Well, an important fact to remember when writing about characters is that writers are usually offering the reader a clue about their characters with every item that they state about the character. For instance, if a colour is used, it can depict something about the character wearing that colour. For instance, if we read Little Red Riding Hood which is a children’s fairy story, the red is flagging up the fact that blood will be spilt. Okay, they play with our childish heads in this one because to cause tension in the tale, the reader is led to believe that it is the wearer of the cloak that will come undone. However, because it is a story and good usually overcomes evil, it is the wolf that loses the blood in the end. You could write:

“Using the colour red for the main character’s name expertly causes reader expectation and also uses it to push the plot along too.”

However, it is important to understand that when using something as simple as the colour red to write about characterization, you have to be aware that the meaning can change due to context. For instance, if you were writing a book report on Margaret Atwood’s ‘Handmaid’s Tale’, you could write again about the Handmaids wearing red but it would mean something else altogether. In this instance, even though it is still depicting blood, it is not blood as in death but blood as in life and fertility. In other words, you could write:

“Atwood slyly dresses the Handmaids in red to depict that they are used predominantly to produce children.”

Can you see how inserting the adverb slyly into the sentence insinuates that Atwood is positively manipulating the relationship between reader and text? It only takes one word to add critical views to an analytical sentence.

Alternatively, if the colour red is worn by a female character in a 19^thcentury text, it could be depicting something different again. Often, if a female character wore a red dress it usually meant that she was a fallen woman or a prostitute. Hence, when writing about clothing for characterization, there are two important things to remember:

• Clothing often symbolizes some essence of the character. This can either be foreshadowing what might happen to the character; how the role of the character in the society is depicted in the book or how society views the character.
• The interpretation of the clothing symbolism has to be set in context with the text.