At least, I am according to Amazon. This is funny because the only things I’ve had published have been in my own college literary journals, and those aren’t for sale on Amazon. But they still think I’m an author. Here’s how I know this.

I post a lot of my shorter reviews, mostly book reviews, to Amazon. My House of Holes review disappeared. I’ve talked about House of Holes here before. I just assumed that it went poof because of the content, although I was as clean as a person can possibly be when talking about a book called HOUSE OF HOLES, a book where a disembodied arm feels up a girl IN THE FIRST CHAPTER.

Anyway, it was an outlier. One of the only positive reviews for that book. So I was miffed my opinion was eradicated.

Then, my Ender’s Game review disappeared. My Ender’s Game review was not positive. I hate Ender’s Game.

Here’s the review from my Goodreads, which is basically what I copied to Amazon.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Ender’s Game is basically Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War but in space. Kids are mean! They beat each other up! The plot is virtually non-existent. Ender and co. bounce around in zero gravity for at least sixty pages, training in a banal combat game that doesn’t provide its participants with any useful skills (nor the reader with anything resembling entertainment) to fight the buggers, the stupidly named alien race that almost wiped out humanity decades ago and might wipe us out again. Or something. The majority of the bugger plot, the only remotely interesting plot point in the entire 324-page book, is crammed into the last two chapters.

Card’s writing style is dull and boring. He clumsily shifts between third- and first-person perspective for no good reason. He fails basic Writing 101: show the reader, don’t just tell. Valentine and Peter create online aliases for themselves: Locke and Desmosthenes. The two have lively Interweb discussions. Or at least Card says they do. Not a single article, post, or debate is actually written, so we have to take Card’s poorly written word for it. “They began composing debates for their characters. Valentine would prepare an opening statement, and Peter would invent a throwaway name to answer her. His answer would be intelligent, and the debate would be lively, lots of clever invective and political rhetoric. Valentine had a knack for alliteration that made her phrases memorable.” Perhaps if Card had the same knack for alliteration some of his phrases would be memorable. They’re not. The dialog is bad, the jokes aren’t funny, and the kids sometimes slip into a weird pidgin English when insulting each other. It doesn’t make sense.

Also, all the adults are Bad. “There is no teacher but the enemy,” one of Ender’s mentors tells him. Anti-authoritarianism can make great drama when it has purpose. This just sounds like the long-winded, non-sensical rebuttal of a bratty student who did poorly in school. Probably in his writing classes.

View all my reviews

My 1-star review was fairly divisive, with about 30 people saying it was “helpful” and slightly more saying it wasn’t. This review got the most feedback from any review I’ve posted on Amazon, besides my mostly positive Buffy Season 9 comic book review that prompted someone to post a review titled, “Chance Lee Is an Idiot”, which got deleted.

So, Ender’s Game. That review was deleted last month sometime. Now, this review had been up for almost two years. Wha’ happen? I e-mail Amazon and get this response:

We do not allow reviews on behalf of a person or company with a financial interest in the product or a directly competing product. This includes authors, artists, publishers, manufacturers, or third-party merchants selling the product. As a result, we’ve removed your reviews for this title.

Umm, how do I have a financial interest in this book? Even if I was a published author, it wouldn’t be in the whiny juvenile sub-genre of sci-fi bullshit. I asked for clarification, and received the exact same response, word for word, from their copy/paste customer service checklist, along with this addendum:

We will not be able to go into further detail about our research.

I understand that you are upset, and I regret that we have not been able to address your concerns to your satisfaction. However, we will not be able to offer any additional insight or action on this matter.

My one review doesn’t matter, and I doubt it affected sales of this book in any way. I just find its deletion weird, and wonder that if this is the actual reason, why are any of my reviews still up? 98% of them are for books. Will they eventually disappear? And how many other outlying reviews is Amazon deleting? Again, who cares? I’m just curious.