Last night I posted reviews on two cookbooks on amazon. I gave one of the books one star and the other two stars. I have a huge selection of cookbooks so I requested these books from my library so I could decide if they would be worth buying and adding to my collection.
Here's the deal, for reasons I won't go into here, I need to eliminate soy from my diet, to the extent that is possible. Both of these books advertise that they have soy free recipes in their books.
The book I gave two stars to labeled their recipes with "soy-free" or "soy-free option" in the recipes that supposedly don't contain soy. I liked that it was organized this way (they also had gluten free and oil free recipes / options as well) but I had a big issue with the fact that the author obviously doesn't know where all soy is contained. It's like gluten - it's in EVERYTHING - so you have to be careful. For example, I only did a quick skim of the recipes but found two that were labeled soy-free that clearly weren't. One was for a tofu recipe, the other was for a tempeh recipe - both of which are made from soy beans. The tofu recipe was listed as "soy-free option" and gave you a substitution for soy sauce but offered nothing for the tofu and tofu was in the recipe name (as was tempeh in the tempeh recipe). To me that's unforgivable. Know your ingredients before you label it because some people will depend on your label and if it's an allergy issue, it could kill them!
The other book not only didn't label the recipes, they weren't organized to distinguish what the recipes were "free of". One of its claims were recipes without eggs. Well, obviously I could distinguish which ones weren't egg free but there was nothing to distinguish the others.
My hope had been that I could pull up a recipe and make it, safe in knowing it was soy free but that's not possible with either of these cookbooks. With either of these cookbooks I would have to label read my ingredients and I was hoping to eliminate that to the extent I could (I know at least one of these books and I think possibly both of them would say "buy a gluten free [insert ingredient] here" and then offer not options). Frustrating.
But the point of this post (long way to get here, I know) is, I used to not review books unless I could give them a five star rating because I didn't want to be negative. Then, a few years ago, I went to find a review from a particular reviewer and realized that the lowest she ever gave was a four star review. She reviews hundreds a week - literally! But none are ever less than a four star book? I don't buy it and I no longer give her reviews credit. In fact I read her four stars as "it sucked" now. Seriously. So, I don't shy away from reviewing books (or items) that I don't care for anymore. Yes, it's still unevenly balanced in the positive side but I hope that the lower starred reviews give those five star reviews credit and the other way around as well.
What about you? Do you balance out your reviews or just show one side or the other?
