How are readers reacting to Yann Martel’s followup to his best selling, Booker-winning Life of Pi?

In the NYT last week, Michiko Katutani gave Beatrice and Virgil as bad a review as a book can get.

Two booksellers are not buying it. In the Huffington Post, Praveen Madan and Christin Evans from The Booksmith in San Francisco, write a defense of the book in the form of a conversation with a customer. They point out that “more than two-thirds of the reviews on Amazon were 4 & 5 star reviews,” indicating that “newspaper critics are out of touch with readers.”

In libraries, the negative reviews may have had an effect; holds are running an average of 3:1 in those we checked, on modest ordering (two or fewer per branch).

As we noted earlier, among prepub reviews, only Booklist was positive, awarding it a star. And, not all the consumer reviews have been negative. USA Today‘s Dierdre Donahue said, “…this lean little allegory about a talking donkey and monkey… might be a masterpiece about the Holocaust.”

Beatrice and Virgil Yann Martel Retail Price: $24.00 Hardcover: 224 pages Publisher: Spiegel & Grau – (2010-04-13) ISBN / EAN: 1400069262 / 9781400069262

RH Audio: UNABR; 9780307715159; $30
Large Print: trade pbk; 9780739377802; $24
Adobe EPUB eBook and WMA Audiobook available from OverDrive

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 at 7:31 am and is filed under 2010/11 - Winter/Spring, Literary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.