No review is complete without saying something about how you spent your summer vacation. Or if you're a Goodreads member, post a pile of moving pictures that bear no relation to story, but people like that stuff and the reviewer picks up a train. So many reviews talk with pictures there at Goodreads. There too, you can find reviews that run the gamut...take any story you enjoy...look at the reviews there...and you find everything under the sun.
If someone...or my self...makes a claim about any story, I prefer the reviewer be subject to the same law applied to the writer. Show us, don't tell us.
Reviews that claim something fashionable...misogynist...or racist...without telling me why the reviewer has made that claim is so much clanging cymbals. Noise. Nothing more nothing less.
Reviews that ask a question about a detail in the story are good.
One thing I've done with stories is to create an index. Stories don't come with one and my indexing is related more to my own failing as a reader. It has always taken me some time to "get it" and indexing helps me get it. That and reading the story five times. Oh...okay...now I get it. Others can read a story once and they're waiting there at the station for me...I come lolly-gagging in, tongue hanging out, damp...and everyone is already boarding the next train to leave the station. I'm left looking at the graffiti and posters on the wall.
But with indexing, it is curious to look at one story's index and compare/contrast that to another story's index. Minor characters fascinate me. We hear so much about the world's population...so it seems like that should be reflected in story. Reminded of a story I read, character in Chicago...and I'd been in some of the same places, but the story did not bring back that Chicago to me, not the one I saw. Too, cultural...thingies...indexing them. King's stories generate indexes 12 pages long...nothing but character names, cultural thingies (music, books, the rich and filthy, the famous and infamous)...and there could be 3-4 pages of minor characters. The gum-chewing waitress with shoulders like Sunny Liston. And I've discovered that other writers whose stories generate long indexes are the kind of stories I like to read.
Places, too, index them. If a writer says "they entered the restaurant"...I make a note: restaurant. Ready to turn the channel yet? Say like with King...and other "good" story-tellers, we don't get "restaurant"...we get something better. Needful Things. But in the end, my indexes only mean something to me and I don't get funding to adjudicate hybridity, theorize diaspora...but there's drywall that needs mudding and in the end that is more gratifying. And so it goes.