I started my professional writing life as a political columnist, and I often joke that the vitriolic emails and online comments I received from that side of my life were great preparation for some of the snarkier review journals in my present life as a writer of young adult fiction. Too many anonymous reviewers use their alternate online persona as a blank check to for cruelty. It’s as if being faceless themselves allows them to forget that there is a living, breathing human being with a full range of emotions who will be affected by their words. In my own experience, online anonymity led to serious bullying and threats. Last November, a man who objected to a political tweet I’d directed toward another person he followed, scraped a picture of me and my deceased father, on the one-year anniversary of his death, and used the image to create a Twitter account called “SaraC**tWh*r*.” When Twitter shut down his account, he made another account and tweeted a reference to my being on an “I like rape” message board—and threatened to make me a “real victim.” He eventually stopped contacting me, and I never found out his identity. While my experience with anonymous book reviews hasn’t been that extreme, what I’ve learned in my decade as a published author is that reviews, anonymous or not (as well as well-written or not), can hurt in other ways. It’s for that reason that I stopped reading reviews on Goodreads. As an author, I’m a voracious reader, and I want to read other author’s reviews, too. However, every time I logged onto the site to track my own reading, I was automatically shown the ratings and number of reviews of my own books. What I find disturbing is when the reviews (some of which are anonymous, some aren’t) contain review of matter that is unrelated to the book, such as the author’s behavior on social media. This is against Goodreads policy. Ultimately, what being a book author and online citizen means is that there is a lot out of my control. Not everyone is going to like my books, and I can choose to learn from constructive negative reviews, and use the information to improve my writing. I can also choose to ignore truly nasty reviews, because most lack thought and empathy. So if I get a bad review, I vent to my friends, throw a time-limited pity party, and keep a stash of emergency chocolate close by. Most important of all, I get on with writing the next book. What I don’t do is go to a blogger’s house—like what YA author Kathleen Hale confessed to doing in her last October article in The Guardian—unless I’ve been invited. Sarah Darer Littman is the author of Want to Go Private? (2001); Life, After (Scholastic, 2010); Purge (all three Scholastic, 2009); and Confessions of a Closet Catholic (Puffin, 2005), winner of the Sydney Taylor Book Award. Her latest novel, Backlash (Scholastic), is hitting shelves March 31. When she’s not writing novels, Sarah is a columnist for CTNewsJunkie and teaches creative writing at Western Connecticut State University.