Book Club Social Media Review Template - Augustown by Kei Miller
Book Club Social Media Templates for Auguston by Kei Miller
We’re meeting for book club the first Sunday in June, and until then, here are ways you can share and save your reading experience of Augustown by Kei Miller.
Tag us in your Twitter Fleets and IG Stories with your reviews (even if you miss book club and you’re reading this long after)
Click to download images:
My Thoughts (so far)
Something I’ve Learned While Reading
Favourite Quotes From the Book
Something I Need to Learn More About
Final Review of Augustown
Book Club Social Media Review Templates - My Fishy Stepmom by Shakirah Bourne
Book Club Social Media Templates for My Fishy Stepmom by Shakirah Bourne
Here are ways you can share and save your reading experience of My Fishy Stepmom by Shakirah Bourne.
Tag us in your Twitter Fleets and IG Stories with your reviews (even if you miss book club and you’re reading this long after)
Click to download images:
My Thoughts (so far)
Something I’ve Learned While Reading
Favourite Quotes From the Book
Something I Need to Learn More About
My Starred Review of My Fishy Stepmom
All About Love by bell hooks: Bookstagram Template
Perhaps the best online pandemic trend is all the new bookstagram accounts popping up, here are some templates for this month’s book club meetup.
We’re back with Bookstagram & Twitter fleets review templates
Bookstagram Templates
Get more book(ish) digital downloads by becoming a Rebel Women Lit member
About Rebel Women Lit
Rebel Women Lit is an open book club, turned literary community, based in Jamaica. We focus on stories from women, non-binary persons, queer persons, and other voices that have been traditionally marginalised in publishing. Yes, everything we do is political and deliberate. We have a podcast, book store, free community library, youtube channel and a few awesome projects.
Like A Mule Bringing Ice-Cream To The Sun: Bookstagram Templates
Free bookstagram and fleets template downloads to talk about Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun by Sarah Ladipo Manyika
If you read Like A Mule Bringing Ice Cream To The Sun chances are you’re eager to share your thoughts with your friends and other book lovers. So we made templates to make it easier for you to share on IG Stories & Twitter Fleets.
Click to download:
Favourite Quote
Photo of Current Read
Thoughts on Current Read
Book Review
Like our digital downloads? Get more book(ish) downloads by becoming a Rebel Women Lit member and patron
About Rebel Women Lit
Rebel Women Lit is an open book club, turned literary community, based in Jamaica. We focus on stories from women, non-binary persons, queer persons, and other voices that have been traditionally marginalised in publishing. Yes, everything we do is political and deliberate. We have a podcast, book store, free community library, youtube channel and a few awesome projects.
How To Write The Perfect Bookstagram Review
Bookstagram has made everyone a book critic, but how do you join and write the perfect bookstagram review? We asked some of our favourite Bookstagrammers for tips.
Bookstagram has made everyone a critic, and we love that.
The democratisation of literary criticism has seen a rise thanks to social media and places like Bookstagram (Instagram for Books Lovers). Bookstagram has been chipping away at the misconception that only a certain class of people can have something useful to say about literature and has made everyone a critic.
But how do you critique a book in 2200 characters, make it interesting, genuine, and hopefully get people to say more than “cute pic!”?
We asked some of our favourite Bookstagrammers to share their tips for writing book reviews, staying genuine, creative and helpful to other readers. Here’s what they had to say:
Apphia - @soulflower.reading
(Trinidad & Tobago)
Back in 2018 I made the popular resolution to read more books and started sharing about the books I truly enjoyed on Instagram. I wanted to simply document my thoughts and map my reading journey.
My practical piece of advice for writing [great] book reviews is to take notes while you’re reading; anything that caught your attention and how you felt about it, jot it down at the moment because if you’re like me, as much as you try to convince yourself, you won’t remember later. Reread and flesh out or expand on your notes when you’re finished reading the book and you’re ready to write your review.
My more sentimental advice is to be genuine. I appreciate reviews that are sincere. They take on a bit of personality and are best at convincing me to read more books. And even if the review is negative, the necessary ‘why’ was asked and answered! Don’t fake the funk.
Katlen - @therosepetals__
(Cayman Islands)
Bookstagram is a safe place for many, but like other forms of social media, it can develop harmful traits in a person.
A bookstragmmer might experience the plague of comparison, the pressure to be the most “woke,” the need to constantly create content, or the urge to present an inauthentic self to become more popular or marketable.
My advice is to always remember why you started your bookstagram and to remain truthful to yourself. When you write your reviews or reflections, be authentic and honest while being conscious of your impact. People will naturally gravitate towards you, as you remain true. However, it is not about the number of followers. What really matters is the joy of creating and sharing within a community of other book lovers.
Maëlla - @ladyinsaeng
(Guadalupe)
I review like 1 out of 15 books I read because my number one rule before I review anything is: Only review when you care enough to share your honest opinion.
Only then I'll look for answers to these questions:
What did I enjoy about the themes?
What did I enjoy about character development?
What did I enjoy about the plot?
While writing the review, I try not to give away major plot twists. If it's a Caribbean book, I make sure to mention my opinion on the Caribbean culture/history/identity elements.
I don't care much about writing a summary because my goal is to share my experience as a reader and try to make others feel what I felt.
Akilah - @ifthisisparadise
(Jamaica)
Trust your voice. There is no template.
There are so many different ways to respond to a text, to get the most out of your relationship formed with it that does the work justice and gives you creative catharsis (whether the book flop or not).
Never feel that you have to go for any "traditional" critical approach. Your review could be a poem or a visual artwork. Take in other reviews, on and off, bookstagram. Find readers with varied, quality perspectives, with response styles that you like, and feel free to incorporate some of those elements into your own reviews.
In a nutshell: take care of yourself, take care of the book, then write whatever the fuck you want.
If you have a Bookstagram account, or you follow a few, what are some review tips you’d share with new Bookstagrammers?
About Rebel Women Lit
Rebel Women Lit is an open book club, turned literary community, based in Jamaica.
We focus on stories from women, non-binary persons, queer persons, and other voices that have been traditionally marginalised in publishing. Yes, everything we do is political and deliberate.
You can join the Rebel Women Lit community & if you’re a Caribbean Literary Content Creator, join our database
The Girl with the Hazel Eyes: Bookstagram Template & Playlist
Perhaps the best online pandemic trend is all the new bookstagram accounts popping up, here are some templates for this month’s book club meetup.
Perhaps the best online pandemic trend is all the new bookstagram accounts popping up (Instagram feeds featuring books people are reading). As you can imagine we're over the moon about this!
When we started our open book club a few years back it was so unusual (especially in Jamaica) for strangers to meet up to chat about books. Now it's truly the new normal.
It's a thrill to see new Caribbean book(ish) content creators pop-up and older ones flourish, so we decided to create a public database on our website to highlight as many Caribbean Book(ish) Content Creators & Curators as possible. Do go check it out to find new social media literary friends!
We also curated some great content for our new online literary friends who are reading The Girl With The Hazel Eyes with us this month in book club.
Playlist of Suzane Taylor’s Favourite Songs
Here’s the Spotify and Youtube playlist of Suzanne Taylor’s favourite songs.
Bookstagram Templates
Get more book(ish) digital downloads by becoming a Rebel Women Lit member and patron
About Rebel Women Lit
Rebel Women Lit is an open book club, turned literary community, based in Jamaica. We focus on stories from women, non-binary persons, queer persons, and other voices that have been traditionally marginalised in publishing. Yes, everything we do is political and deliberate. We have a podcast, book store, free community library, youtube channel and a few awesome projects.
The Confessions of Frannie Langton Review + Tea with Sara Collins on our Podcast
We review the Confessions of Frannie Langton and chat with Sara Collins, on Like A Real Book Club.
In The Confessions of Frannie Langton, Frannie shares her story of being formerly enslaved in Jamaica, who is then brought to England as an (under) employed servant, becomes a dominatrix sex worker, and later accused of murdering her employers.
Sis goes through a lot...
Everyone in book club was a little hesitant to start this book because the marketing focused on it being a slave narrative, an Lorde knows we can’t all handle the trauma that tends to come from books about slavery. But by in the first couple of pages, Frannie won us over convincing us that we’ve never read a book like this before.
“This is a story of love, not just murder, though I know that’s not the kind of story you’re expecting. In truth, no one expects any kind of story from a woman like me. No doubt you think this will be one of those slave histories, all sugared over with misery and despair. But who’d want to read one of those? No, this is my account of myself and my own life and the happiness that came to it, which was not a thing I thought I’d ever be allowed, the happiness or the account.”
Excerpt From: Sara Collins. “The Confessions of Frannie Langton.”
The book does indeed highlight slavery through the stories of experiments done on Caribbean plantations in the name of “science”, the motivations of white abolitionists, and other themes that we don’t see in best selling books based in the 19th Century England that are still on our CXC syllabus cough cough Jane Austen. Perhaps one of the best things about The Confessions of Frannie Langton is that it doesn’t throw historical records in our faces, instead, Sara Collins subtly shows how slavery built the UK’s wealth and how many people living in the UK never had to think about it when they asked for someone to “pass the sugar”.
At the start of book club a few people acknowledged that they stayed up all night reading the book, and Candiese even did a speed-read through the last few pages just before the meeting so she could talk about it! 🤣
Kristina summed up a lot of our feelings about being introduced to Frannie and Frannie’s drive to tell her own story.
The style of The Confessions of Frannie Langton is something we also admired for its very poetic and metaphorical language. In the book “scientists” try to find reasons for treating black people as sub-human, whereas Frannie uses logic and her hunger for knowledge to discover more about her humanity and the brutal ironies of abolitionists and slave-owners alike.
“It is impossible to be both black and a woman. Did you know that? No one was asking me to give any lectures. They allow some blacks to impress them. Men like Sancho, Equiano … Yet I fail to see what was so impressive about them. They wrote, yes. But thousands could, if someone would bother to teach them. And everything they wrote was written for whites. Petitions. Appeals. It’s another of this world’s laws. Blacks will write only about suffering, and only for white people, as if our purpose here is to change their minds.”
Excerpt From: Sara Collins. “The Confessions of Frannie Langton.”
Finally, the sex… oh the sex. No one saw The School House scenes coming and we couldn’t have predicted how thought-provoking it would’ve been to see 19th-century dominatrix black women in London. This spurred a lot of discussions about the politics of sex and how trauma can make its way into sex and sex work.
(No videos on that, go read the book! lol)
Another thing we really admired about the book was the intense that went into it. So much so that Natasha put together a playlist featuring all of Sara’s youtube videos talking about the research for the book.
There were a few things we wished were included in the book, particularly more about Paradise, Montego-Bay and more interactions between Frannie and other black people.
We got a chance to interview Sara Collins about her debut novel in our podcast Like A Real Book Club, and without even mentioning that we wanted to see more of Paradise, she brought up why she chose to tell the story the way she did.
Bonus: She talks about her upcoming sophomore novel.
And, in case you missed it, we also did our Like A Real Book Club podcast meetup to talk about this book in more details about the book and its plot.
We highly recommend reading this book and we guarantee it’s unlike any story you’ve read and we’re happy that it’s being adapted into a television series.
Subscribe to our podcast: Like A Real Book Club
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See You At Book Club!