Month: September 2024

December 29th, 2002, was the most terrifying car ride of my life. I sat in the backseat, knuckles white as I grasped the car seat, silently praying that the unthinkable would not occur while knowing in my heart that it would. We would get into an accident and never make it home. And I had no way to protect the brand new human riding beside me.

Looking back, I know that it wasn’t actually a scary ride. The speed limit on the expressway through Grand Rapids was still fifty-five back then, and it was a Sunday afternoon. Practically no one was on the streets, and we were only traveling eight miles. But I was a new mom, and everything in the world was designed to harm my child.

The car ride we took on September 21st, 2024 wasn’t nearly as scary (even though the early morning fog created a very real danger that we hadn’t faced twenty-two years before), but everything about it should have been. Because I was driving that very same baby to the airport (an airport three miles from the apartment to which we’d made that first, harrowing post-natal journey) to send him two-thousand miles away from me and my biological imperative to make the world safe for him.

My son is a grown person now. I can trust (within reason) that he’s not going to eat a thumbtack off the floor or drown himself in the toilet. He has more money in the bank at twenty-two than I ever had at that age (of course, I was twenty-two on that Sunday morning terror journey and therefore my capital was tied up in diapers). There’s an apartment waiting for him, with a girlfriend and a roommate, and the whole city of Los Angeles to find work and build a life in. He’s been raised to be independent, despite the fact that I cut his meat and poured his juice for far too long (my fed-up husband slammed his fork down during dinner one night and roared, “For god’s sake, Jen, he’s fourteen years old!”). My son knows he can call us for help with things, and he also knows how to find answers to problems on his own. But as I watched him maneuver his three suitcases and giant backpack through check-in, I thought: this is wrong. This is all wrong.

To my heart, I was failing. I was being neglectful and reckless. Who just lets their child go to California by themselves? Who would allow their precious baby to go off into a world that’s already cruel, to a place currently surrounded by fire and under constant threat of The Big One?

At the same age my son is now, his father and I were heading home to our two-bedroom basement apartment with thirty dollars in our checking account and a brand new human to care for. The evidence points to our son’s new situation being entirely survivable, on a pretty low difficulty setting in comparison. But none of that matters to my irrational, forever-altered-by-pregnancy brain. While I can logically accept that he’s safe, he’s well, and everyone leaves the nest at some point, and I can even be proud of him for making such a big step, I can’t reason with the tight, squeezing feeling in my chest that leaves me suddenly breathless or the burning wet in my eyes that I have to hastily blink away. This is what kids are supposed to do. My job as an active parent was always supposed to end. With some exceptions, the goal of raising a child is to see them eventually leave you.

I don’t think people are entirely honest about what it feels like for a child to leave home, even under perfect first-time-home-leaving conditions. Parents with three kids in high school dream of what it will be like “when the kids are out on their own.” When those three kids peel off the exit ramp to college or marriage or adventure, those parents are supposed to tell everyone about how great life is as an “empty-nester.” The house is cleaner and quieter, they can drop whatever they’re doing and traipse off for the weekend if they feel like it. They don’t have to hide snacks anymore and they can have sex right in the middle of the day and make as much noise as they want. It’s like parents with adult children seek out parents deep in the throes of soccer practice commutes and puberty mood swings specifically, just to gloat that one day, the kids will be gone and your life will be as great as theirs are.

I think they’re mostly lying.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s going to be nice to have all our forks back in the kitchen, rather than strewn around my kid’s bedroom. And I’m looking forward to a larger share of our sparse internet connectivity. But the mainstream, nuclear-family-normative culture around me didn’t prepare me at all for the sadness I feel. I spent a whole day in bed. I told my usually stoic husband that I’m sad. He said, “Me, too.” For anyone who knows him, that’s the equivalent of falling to the ground wailing. We still have one child at home, but she’s sad, too. “Now our portions are going to be weird,” she said when I turned on the oven to make dinner. Our son didn’t just take our Nintendo Switch along with him. He took our normalcy.

Maybe it isn’t right to describe this feeling as grief. After all, we didn’t lose our son. We know where he is. He’s in Long Beach. We have his address and everything. But it feels like a death: the death of the way our family operated for two decades. And just like when an actual death is expected, it’s still a sudden shock when it actually happens. There’s still an adjustment that has to be reckoned with, a hole where the person used to be every day. The difference is that unlike a death, I can reasonably say that I will see my kid again, without a bunch of anonymous internet trolls quoting contradictory bible verses at me to explain why my coping method is “illogical.”

We should be more honest with parents about a lot of things. How really fucking expensive kids are (two gallons of milk just lasted four days straight for the first time in ten years and I almost wept). How everyone will give you unsolicited advice in a tone that suggests you’re failing, and worse, you’re the only parent alive who’s failing. We should be honest about the doubts we all feel. And we should be honest with each other about the grieving aspect of watching your family transition from a couple of kids and a couple of parents to an adult, a teen, and a couple of parents who spam the group chat hoping for proof of life. Because the amount of time you have to prepare to let your baby go is the time between that ride home from the hospital and the ride to the airport. And it goes faster than anyone ever expects.

I want to thank literally everybody who has donated to the Ko-fi or joined the Patreon or gave me advice and suggestions as I transition back into “Author With A Day Job” after twenty-two years out of the workforce.

I still haven’t got an interview anywhere that I’ve applied. Either I get form rejected a day after submitting my application, or no one returns my follow-up calls and emails. I feel like the people saying “no one wants to work anymore” should start saying, “no one wants to hire anymore.” You’d think that I would be at least as qualified as a kid who hasn’t graduated high school yet when it comes to running a smoothie machine, but that is not the outlook prospective employers seem to have. I couldn’t even get an interview at a dispensary. A dispensary. That might be the only job I’m over-qualified for.

But I do have some inside intel on a local grocery store. One of their employees will be leaving soon. Much sooner than he told his mother, initially. My son is moving to Los Angeles on September 21st and I am absolutely going to try to snipe his job. But I’m still trying to come to grips with the idea of one of my children leaving. I’ve been a parent for almost twenty-two years. Two whole decades of worrying about these kids, shaping my entire life around making sure they’re provided and cared for, and suddenly it just… isn’t my responsibility anymore? Suddenly, one of them is 2,000 miles away? And totally capable of living on his own?

I’m processing a lot of emotions here. Mainly, that I’m somehow being a bad parent by not taking care of my adult child. Which is bonkers, I know. I was supposed to my raise my kids for them to be independent and capable adults. Mission accomplished. But I guess I never realized that the job actually does end.

There is other, Shonda Rhimes-level drama happening in my life at this time, as well, that has me thinking about parents and children and what families owe to each other. No, seriously: I’m living through something that was actually a plot line on Grey’s Anatomy. But of course, not one where I get banged sideways by a hot surgeon or someone builds a romantic blueprint out of candles on a misty, green-screened Seattle night. Because that’s my luck. But I am on day three of the instant stress headache I got from finding out, so don’t say the universe never gave me nothing.

While I usually say stuff like, “Don’t use writing as your therapy,” and “nobody wants to read your therapy,” I’m breaking my own rule. Because I don’t want to go to therapy. They make you confront your emotions there, and I feel like it works much better to just push it down, push it down, put it in a box and throw it in the sea. Those are the lyrics, by the way, to my pushy-down song. And it’s getting a lot of airplay. So, I started writing a new Sophie book, after swearing the series was over. I have a lot of unresolved trauma that happened between the last book of that series and now, and I need a comfort write. In between my work on Fablemere and my update of Blood Ties Book One: The Turning, I’ve been noodling around in Sophie and El-Mudad and Neil’s world. I don’t have a release date planned yet, or a title. I have more books coming out this year; a paperback of A Kingdom of Pleasure and Torment, the e-book and paperback of The Vampire’s Willing Captive (Fablemere #2), and Her Brother’s Billionaire Best Friend. I’ve also been logging words on The Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp and some various dark romance and fantasy projects.

How have I become so suddenly productive? I stopped taking a medication that I’ve been on for a decade. Turns out, long-term use can cause cognitive impairment and brain fog. And boy, did it ever! Now, instead of struggling to work for an hour a day before getting tired and frustrated, I can actually work and keep track of what I’m doing. It’s incredible. I wish I would have discontinued it long ago.

When I do have news about books and such, I have set up a new Abigail Barnette mailing list. I lost access to my old mailing list a while ago, so if you were on it and want to be on the new one, here’s the link to visit. I’ve learned that promotions and events sometimes require you to advertise them on your email list. I promise, it won’t be a non-stop email fest. I’m not going to be like Impala and try to get you to buy a new pair of rollerskates every day.

That’s about all that’s happening in Trout Nation at the moment.

UPDATE: AMAZON ONE-STAR REVIEWS VISIBLE THROUGH FILTER.

Discord member Themyskira found a way to access the critical reviews that are not linked to the main product page. By scrolling to the bottom of the product page and clicking “see more reviews,” then scrolling down past the top two reviews, the filter system drop downs are working. So, while you can’t click through to one-star reviews from the pop-up or drop down, you can ferret them out that way. However, I think it might depend on how you’re viewing Amazon. I’ve only had a chance to look from my tablet, and mobile Amazon is not giving this option.

There are two reasons this could happen:

An algorithm. I assume that when the percentage of one-star reviews dipped below 1%, the site automatically turned the link to one-star reviews off.

Amazon is doing something shifty. Is it possible? Oh, yeah, absolutely. They’re a fucking evil corporation. But is it more likely that it’s math creating a fuck up? I think so. However, they need to fix this issue, because this being a problem on a book is one thing. They sell fucking medical equipment, food, supplements, car seats, all that stuff that really needs to have easily accessible critical reviews, too.

I’ve heard reviews have been left mentioning this post. Please, do not post one-star reviews you didn’t intend to post. We’d already sent up a test balloon. I did not mean for this to become a call to action. Plus, mentioning me in the reviews puts me in a position where people can come at me in bad faith. There are always drama hounds like drug sniffing dogs, and inevitably someone will intentionally misconstrue this blog post as me encouraging review bombing and hating on Fourth Wing, when it was really a post made from a place of deep distrust of Amazon. Let’s not give people a chance to do that; I already lived through it with Fifty Shades of Grey. If you’re leaving a one-star review, do it because that’s how you feel about the book. If you wanted to leave a one-star review because you read the book and felt it was a one-star read, that’s your prerogative. I just don’t want anyone naming me in those reviews.

MOST OF THE INFORMATION PAST THIS LINE IS REDACTED, EXCEPT FOR THE PARTS ABOUT THE FOURTH WING FANDOM BEING BLESSEDLY NORMAL, REBECCA YARROS BEING BLESSEDLY NORMAL, AND THE PART ABOUT IT MAKING NO SENSE FOR PUBLISHERS TO SUPPRESS REVIEWS. ALL THAT STUFF STANDS.

Imagine that you’ve heard of an incredibly popular book. Like, sweeping the nation popular. People getting tattoos of it and naming their children after the characters popular. Film adaptation announced less than six months after publication popular. Sixty-nine weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list popular.

Your curiosity is piqued, right? Everyone is talking about this book and how amazing it is. And it must be incredible, because at 4.8 out of 5 stars, it’s one of the highest-rated books on Amazon. In fact, out of over 230,000 reviews, not a single one of them is one star!

Wait, what?

This is not an imaginary scenario. This is what’s happening on Amazon right now with Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros:

I noticed this phenomenon a couple of weeks ago. I’ve recently started reading Fourth Wing to recap it on Patreon, and the experience has not been what I’d describe as a five-star read for me. I needed to look something up in the product info and stopped dead in my tracks. Surely, it was impossible that this book had absolutely no one-star reviews? And not in a “I’m not enjoying this book, so no one could have possibly enjoyed it” way. It seemed impossible in a “you can’t get ten people to agree on something, so how do over 200,000 people agree on this?” way.

If you’re familiar with Amazon as a book retailer, then you’re aware that sometimes, one-star reviews can’t be relied upon as an indication of story or writing quality. While some one-star reviews criticize elements and themes, many of them complain about things that are out of the author’s control, like late shipping or torn dust jackets. Sometimes, a one-star review will contain a weird political or religious screed that’s totally disconnected from the book’s content. Other times, a glowing review that lavishes praise on the story is inexplicably (and, I assume, accidentally) rated one-star. But Fourth Wing doesn’t have a single one-star review like that. It has no one-star reviews or ratings on Amazon at all.

I went to the Trout Nation Discord server on August 30th with my confusion:

I will NEVER AGAIN believe that publishers can’t control reviews on Amazon. Out of 233,502 raitings for Fourth Wing, NONE OF THEM ARE ONE STAR.
I’m sorry, that’s just statistically impossible.
It is IMPOSSIBLE that out of the millions upon millions of people who have read that book, EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO HAS REVIEWED IT LIKED IT ENOUGH TO GIVE IT TWO STARS.

After some discussion, server member Venabler said:

I bought my copy through amazon, I could review it. I am not particularly eloquent though. I suppose I could just leave a one star

And on September 6th, Venabler returned to report:

Apparently the review was approved, but i can’t find it on the page. :/

And on September 7th:

I checked again this morning and it’s definitely not there. What a load of horseshit.

Today is September 9th, and there is still no sign of the approved one-star review from Venabler, or any one-star reviews at all.

So… what’s the deal? Let’s walk through some possibilities.

Fourth Wing really is just that universally beloved. This might seem like the scenario that makes the most sense, right? The book is just so amazing that everyone who has reviewed it has organically felt that it was a two-star read or above. This theory doesn’t hold water, though, once you go to other retailers, where Fourth Wing is still highly rated, but also has one-star reviews. For example, Barnes & Noble has Fourth Wing sitting at 4.6 out of 5 stars, with a much lower overall review count of 327 published reviews. Of those, fifteen are one-star reviews. GoodReads, which is coincidentally owned by Amazon, shows over 18,000 one-star ratings, over 6,000 of those attached to full reviews. Plus, we know that at least one person has had a one-star review of Fourth Wing approved at Amazon. It’s just not showing up on the page.

The publisher is suppressing reviews. There’s a rumor out in publishing spaces claiming that traditional publishers have the power to force Amazon to remove bad reviews. Though I initially had the knee-jerk reaction that this must be the case with Fourth Wing, after thought I began to doubt that deeply. If that were the case, none of the Big Names would have any one-star reviews on their books. It would be baked into people’s contracts at that point: “The publisher agrees to waste resources policing reviews of the work at online retailers.” Nobody is going to do that. Not even Red Tower, who have driven their books to proven success through huge marketing budgets and painfully obvious hype methods.

If the publisher was behind the lack of one-star reviews, or if they were somehow paying Amazon to remove those reviews, wouldn’t we see the second book in the series get the same treatment? After all, when Iron Flame, the sequel to Fourth Wing, was released, it was an utter disaster. Copies came with missing pages, sections glued in upside down, and the wrong title on some spines. So many of the one-star reviews of Iron Flame are complaints about manufacturing quality that it would make more sense for the publisher to somehow suppress reviews of Iron Flame. And no other Red Tower titles seem to be benefiting from this theory; only Abigail Owens’s The Games Gods Play shares Fourth Wing‘s lack of one-star reviews, and that book was released on September 3rd of this year. Fourth Wing has had since May of 2023 to earn even a single one-star review, and it hasn’t.

As an imprint, Red Tower has excelled at manipulating the market. If eliminating the reviews on one title worked well enough to reach Fourth Wing levels of success, then they would be doing it, shamelessly, across every title in their catalogue. Even if it were possible for a publisher to pay Amazon to remove one-star reviews, it’s unlikely that this is the case with Fourth Wing.

Fans are mass-reporting one-star reviews. At the bottom of every Amazon review, there’s a link that says “report.” When you click on it, this happens:

It’s 2024. Everyone on the internet knows that massive sites use an algorithm to determine what does and doesn’t go against community guidelines, and that “community guidelines” often means “vague rules, arbitrarily enforced.” Is it possible that Fourth Wing fans are so obsessed, so petty, so righteously outraged by the idea of anyone not liking the book that they would mobilize en masse to falsely report valid one-star reviews? I suppose so. But if any fandom were going to do that, would it really be Fourth Wing‘s fandom? Fourth Wing fans are passionate, but they’re not as vitriolic in their defense of their favorite series as some other stans are. It seems more likely that a wave of diabolical consumer malfeasance would come from a much larger fandom, one with a reputation for being the Mean Girls of the reading world.

Look, what I’m saying is: if any fandom were going to do something like that, it would be Sarah J. Maas’s fandom.

It’s also just not that easy to get reviews removed from Amazon. If it were, we wouldn’t have seen Fifty Shades of Grey receive one-star reviews (do we all remember just how deeply untethered from reality and reason that fandom was at its height?). A Court of Thorns and Roses has about the same number of Amazon reviews as Fourth Wing, but 1% of them are one-star. Other popular “BookTok books” have one-star reviews, and fandoms who become deeply offended at any whiff of criticism.

So far, Fourth Wing fans in bookish spaces don’t seem united in some kind of imagined victimhood when it comes to people not liking their favorite book. I believe a lot of that can be credited to Rebecca Yarros, who focuses on the positive and discourages the negative. She hasn’t thrown public tantrums about criticism (E.L. James), or stayed silent about controversies relating to her work or public image while her fandom has time and again crusaded against “the haters” (Sarah J. Maas). When Yarros received feedback about her appropriation of a dying language, she immediately addressed it and promised to do better. When she was questioned about her “both sides” stance regarding Israel and Palestine, she donated books to an auction raising funds for those suffering in Gaza. While people can and have questioned her motives behind both of these actions, no one can reasonably argue that Yarros has ever encouraged her readers to ride at dawn, her banner raised high, against even criticism of her work or person.

With all of this in mind, it seems unlikely that Fourth Wing fans have mobilized on a large scale to intentionally suppress reviews. And if they did, it’s even more unlikely that they could have somehow kept it hidden from the book world at large. There is no central hub for Fourth Wing fans with a gated entrance, as there was for a prominent romantasy series whose author kept a riddle-guarded private Facebook group until the readers were disappointed with an entry in the series and the group was immediately nuked. There is no universal gathering spot where a plot like this could be hatched, and even if there was, to misquote Ian Malcolm, haters, uh… find a way. We would know about it by now. But no one seems to be talking about the lack of one-star reviews on Fourth Wing at all, much less campaigning to protect the series from reviews.

Amazon is suppressing Fourth Wing reviews to protect their own interests. Ultimately, only Amazon has the power to remove or suppress reviews. Only Amazon has the power to tell customers like Venabler that their reviews have been approved, only to keep them from posting to the site. And Amazon, coincidentally, is producing a Fourth Wing television adaptation, so they have a real stake in its success.

MGM Amazon Studios owns the rights to several fantasy series, though, and you can find one-star reviews on the actual shows they’ve already produced. Why does Fourth Wing need this type of protection? What is it about critical Fourth Wing reviews that would have Amazon so terrified? The book isn’t full of offensive stereotypes (aside from the inspiration-porn angle of the main character overcoming a serious disability through sheer determination). It isn’t controversial. It just… is. It exists, some people like it, some don’t.

There doesn’t seem to be a single, plausible explanation for why Amazon isn’t allowing one-star reviews of Fourth Wing to stand. But even if a reason were presented, this is still a huge red flag. How can any Amazon product review be trusted if we know that they’re simply not making one-star reviews public? If they’re doing it on Fourth Wing‘s product page, then where else might they be doing it? Toys? Vitamins? Baby formula? Are they only carrying out this practice where it’s basically harmless, like reviews on popular but not controversial books and films? Is this a glitch, or a feature that companies are able to exploit? Where does Amazon draw the line between making money and duping consumers?

Unfortunately, that’s not something Amazon is ever likely to answer. It’s an open secret that compensated product reviews run rampant (and undisclosed) on the site. There’s also a theory, supported by some in the publishing industry, that bad reviews can sell books as easily as good ones do (see, again: Fifty Shades of Grey). Others feel that Amazon reviews have very little effect on a book’s overall success at all. Did Amazon miss this memo? Or did the publisher?

We may never know what or who is behind the suppressed one-star Amazon reviews of Fourth Wing, but this situation should at least sow a few seeds of doubt in the rational consumer’s mind. At present, it seems that where Amazon-affiliated products are concerned, discerning customers should seek out product reviews elsewhere, and critical reviews of media, books in particular, should be backed up at a separate platform in case this becomes a site-wide trend.