Critical review examples

A student’s critical review example

Here is a review that earned 9.5/10. Try to achieve this level of engagement with the issue you decide to write on, and this level of narrative style in your own reviews.

Krista Stusiak’s critical review of Legends of Vancouver (1911), by E. Pauline Johnson

Krista Stusiak
20 Nov. 2008
English 354: Critical Review of E. Pauline Johnson’s Legends of Vancouver
Word count = 397

In her short story cycle Legends of Vancouver (1911), E. Pauline Johnson brings the oral traditions of the Squamish and other Pacific coast bands to print for the “palefaces” of Vancouver. Johnson is able to transfer these legends to page in a flowing, poetic narration. She makes the legends of the Native peoples accessible to a White, colonial audience by emphasizing her empathy for the prejudices and mindset of her English-speaking readers. By presenting the text as a narrated dialogue, Johnson, a half-White Mohawk, is able to align herself with the colonizers, emphasizing this alignment with brief mention of her time spent in London and Vancouver. Her Indian status allows Johnson to present herself as an authoritative voice on Indian lore, but her European associations help her bridge the gap between herself and the “palefaces.” The duality of Johnson’s authoritarian voice comes at a cost to the legends and the people she is presenting herself as a voice for. In order to connect with her colonial audience, Johnson uses stereotypes of and some condescending remarks about the people for whom she is speaking. Johnson uses Christian references to Adam and the flood, and identifies Natives using European political concepts such as “Socialists” and “communists” (49). She inserts herself as the narrator and translator for the stories, and upon critical reading one must ask to what extent her own voice is obscuring the authenticity of the legends. For example, the final “Legend of Vancouver,” “A Royal Mohawk Chief,” is not a Native myth, but colonialist propaganda about the generosity and kindness of the British Royal family. It is highly misleading to place this story within the collection of Squamish myths. Not only is it told from the colonial perspective, but it has very little to do with any historical legend or myth. Furthermore, “A Royal Mohawk Chief” is placed at the end of the cycle, leaving its readers with a falsely positive image of the relationship between the Native peoples of Canada and the colonial forces of Britain. The inclusion of this piece makes it hard for a twenty-first century reader to believe that Johnson was a voice for the Native community at all; hers is only another case of false propaganda. As interesting and well written as Legends of Vancouver is, it does not ultimately appear to be as authentic or as sympathetic as one might hope.

My critical review example…

Here is a review I wrote a few years ago. Remember, I do not expect quite this depth of criticism, nor do I expect as many—indeed any—external sources.

Karyn’s review of Tamarind Mem (1996), by Anita Rau Badami

Karyn Huenemann
5 Jan. 2005
English 387: Review of Tamarind Mem
word count = 396

Salman Rushdie begins his article on “The Indian Writer in England” with a quotation from L.P. Hartley: “The past,” Hartley notes, “is a foreign country […] they do things differently there.” ¹ In Tamarind Mem (1996), Anita Rau Badami has captured this notion of difference across space and time, culture and generation. The setting she provides is stable; it is the character’s perceptions of place, and their narration of events, that are mutable, shifting, elusive. As Lynne Van Luven observes, Tamarind Mem “proves, yet again, that each person in a family experiences that microcosm differently. Only by synthesizing these disparate views do we grasp the full flavour of events.” ² Yet Badami’s text actually resists such synthesis, leaving readers with the knowledge that the past is as unknowable as the future, that the present is a web of associated but disconnected perceptions. Shifts in place, in knowledge, in memory, parallel the reader’s changing familiarity with the characters.

The Kamini who begins the narrative seems an objective narrator of a childhood in India, under the control of an angry, unreasonable mother. The Kamini we are left with is a troubled young woman, alone in a foreign culture, struggling to remain connected to her mother. At the same time, she struggles with her desire to be an independent adult and escape the restrictions placed on women within her culture. Conversely, while the Saroja Kamini shows us is irrationally angry, in Saroja’s voice, the story is deeper, more complex. In Saroja’s narration, the ebb and flow of rivers of tension through the family home can be more easily understood, if not predicted, and the source of the waters of miscommunication and anguish is located in Saroja’s remembrance of her own youth. Our sympathies are not shifted from Kamini to Saroja in any straightforward exchange; rather, we begin with the assumption that we understand—from Kamini’s point of view—the family dynamics, but in the end we are left with the nebulous feeling that there is no truth to distill from the murky waters of the narrative. As Shazia Rahman so deftly observes, “the novel questions knowability itself.”³

Ultimately, Kamini and Saroja’s stories are equally true, equally important. Badami weaves a web of intimate and intricate connections, revealing to us what her characters cannot perceive: the reality and myth, truth and fiction, memory and knowledge, that constructs these women’s lives.

___________________

¹ Salman Rushdie, “The Indian Writer in England,” The Eye of the Beholder: Indian Writing in English, ed. Maggie Butcher (London: Commonwealth Institute, 1983) 75.

² Lynne Van Luven, rev. of Tamarind Mem, by Anita Rau Badami, Quill & Quire June 1996, 15 June 2004 <http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=939> par. 9.

³ Shazia Rahman, “Marketing the Mem: The Packaging and Selling of a First Novel,” Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad 18.1 (1999): 95.