Talk:Bellona's Husband: A Romance/GA2

GA Review

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Reviewer: Vaticidalprophet (talk · contribs) 09:12, 18 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I quite enjoyed reading this article. I take the strict rather than lax view of 'breadth' in the GACR (and, in the general rather than specific case, agree with Fram about the implications of the lax view), but I think this is generally very close to being a GA. My thoughts:

The lead is remarkably short, and should reasonably be two or possibly three full paragraphs. This is the most serious concern -- "complies with the MOS on leads" is a much more objective criterion than "broad", and one obviously rather than debatably not yet in compliance. The most intuitive way this would work out to me is "first paragraph handling the synopsis and second handling the publication + reception", but book leads can be flexible and there could be a few ways to handle it.
I think it is in-scope to put some more info in "Publication history" about the author (roughly: how many other books did he publish in general, was the pseudonym used again after this, if possible was this a typical or atypical example of his work). I recognize this is going to be a borderline call because the article is now an FA, but Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication#Publication history looked about the same before it was an FA, so I think can be reasonably argued to present GA expectations just as well, and includes such context. I completely respect that this is about the book and not the author, but I think this limited information specifically is closer to what would be expected in the book article.
Similarly, it seems worthwhile to include a little detail about the publisher, as they're now defunct and the name won't necessarily be recognizable. Our article clarifies at the time they were one of the largest and best-known publishers in the world -- it seems worthwhile to clarify this poorly-received work came from a major house.
I noticed Hoary's comments on talk about the "time in reverse" narrative. Given that this is a term-of-art for which we don't have a dedicated article, this quote might be better paraphrased to note Clute is describing it as the first example of the aging-backwards literary device (I think?), rather than just giving the raw text.

Comments broadly debatable; the lead is the most important thing currently holding up promotion, but there are a lot of ways to handle it. The bones of the article are excellent, and I hope to promote this very soon. Vaticidalprophet 09:13, 18 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I usually write comparatively brief leads. I have now expanded it somewhat and could expand it more, if you want me to. I would note that the lead is now >10% of the word count of the body, which I would consider fairly lengthy (more than twice the proportion found in the WP:Featured article for To Kill a Mockingbird, for instance). I have added some (in my opinion, loosely relevant) details to the body. I have not added any comparison to the author's other works (beyond the already-included unfavourable critical comparisons to Inquirendo Island), because I could not do so without engaging in WP:Original research or including a bunch of raw data from sources on the author and allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions. I have also not added anything about the publisher, seeing as the sources basically just name-check it anyway (and I consider the publisher a non-defining aspect of this and pretty much every other book). TompaDompa (talk) 12:46, 18 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]