Resource Alert: Book Marks' 5 Reviews You Need to Read This Week

Book Marks call itself "The Rotten Tomatoes for Books." I have written about how much I love it as a resource before here.

While you should 100% check that post out, I wanted to talk today about their weekly feature, "5 Reviews You Need to Read This Week," but with a RA for All twist.

Every week, Book Marks features 5 reviews, with a pull out quote, and a link to the full review. This is a great resources for a few reasons:

1. By identifying titles you need to know about based on their excellent reviews means that this list of books to look out for isn't the same as all of the other lists out there. You find different titles featured, sometimes smaller titles, and sometimes even titles that have been out for a bit and are finally getting covered.
2. As alluded to in 1, it is not always only brand new titles. It is new focused, but not exclusive
3. It mixes fiction and nonfiction. It includes genre, literary, GN. In other words, it can include anything and everything. It is based on the reviews not the book and what category it fits into. The reviews are what spark the editors to include them, not the book itself. The mix of titles is infinitely more interesting than your average "books to look out for" type posts.
4. You can hand sell the book without reading it-- you have the perfect soundbite curated and pulled out for you.
5. These are reviews by people who enjoyed the book enough that it sparked them to write eloquently about it. That is similar to sharing a 5 star Goodreads review in terms of having a resource that uses an example "best reader" to help you share a title, but in this case, that "best reader" is also a professional writer.

But of course, this is RA for All so you now what is coming next....the best reason to use this resource is its backlist!

At the end of the current version of the 5 Reviews You Need to Read This Week, they have links to past ones. OR you can use this link to search an archive of all of these articles. [Side note: they don't have a tag that is transparent so I ran the search to create a link you can use.]

The backlist of these articles will help you to identify interesting and well reviewed titles you may have missed. Chances are you bought a bunch of them already, but they might be lingering on your shelves after their shiny, new phase has passed. 

The 5 Reviews You Need to Read This Week backlist is an excellent tool for hard to help patrons as well. You can find them an under the radar title with a soundbite at your fingertips. Also this backlist makes a great resource for your sure bet and/or great reads you may have missed displays. You have an archive of reviews that a professional editor thought were among the best of that week. The curating has been done for you.

Add 5 Reviews You Need to Read This Week to your toolbox of go-to resources.