Focus Friday: Why Doesn’t Focus Review Books? (Come Again?)

Hardly a week goes by in which the Plugged In team doesn’t get an email (or several) like this one:

I love Plugged In and the opportunity it gives me as a busy mom to easily make sure that the content in movies is appropriate for my children. I don’t know what I would do without it!!!! Do you know of any organizations/websites that give a similar review on book content? I would prefer it to be Christian based and very thorough. Any help would be appreciated! Jennifer

Often when I get emails like this, I jokingly forward them to the parenting editor of Thriving Family magazine (Focus’ flagship periodical for families) with a line such as, “Let’s start doing book reviews.”

If you’re a Focus on the Family “groupie,” you already get the joke. If not, you, like Jennifer, are probably scratching your head. The reason it’s kinda funny for those of us who work here is that we already do book reviews, and we have for several years. Okay, maybe it’s not laugh-out-loud funny, but you get my point. And in truth, it can be a little frustrating, too.

Pluggedin.com is privileged to receive an average of 1.2 million visits each and every month. The reason it’s also frustrating is that we wish that all of our visitors knew about our book reviews and utilized this important resource—just like they turn to us for movie reviews. But right now, that’s not happening.

Part of that is our own fault. When you visit Plugged In’s website, you’ll notice that we do mention our book reviews right on the homepage—but it’s far down the page, or “below the fold.” We understand how Web traffic works, and know a lot of folks never scroll down. For that matter, a lot of our regular users never even go to our homepage (Shame! Shame! Okay, just kiddin’!)

But it’s there—right at the bottom of our homepage, tucked neatly between “Family Room” and “Family Safety”. Here’s what it says:

Did you know that Focus on the Family’s thrivingfamily.com reviews books? Designed to bridge the gap between what parents have read themselves and what their kids want to read, reviews cover content, themes and worldview of fiction books.

While there are numerous obvious reasons to read our book reviews (click on the link here to find them), I’ll suggest just one that may be not-so-obvious. On Nov. 1 and Nov. 22, two movies that began as popular books geared toward teens and tweens (Ender’s Game, Hunger Games: Catching Fire respectively) hit the big screen. In addition to reading our movie reviews of these two titles, may I suggest you also consider reading the book reviews?

I’m looking forward to the day in which all manner of emails either requesting that we begin reviewing books or asking us what site we might recommend cease to come our way. I’m hoping this blog will help accomplish this. In the meantime, my weird sense of humor will have me chuckling later today (or sometime this week) when the next email arrives in my inbox urging us to consider reviewing books.