Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) and O, The Oprah Magazine announce the newest Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis (Knopf). In her extraordinary debut, Mathis tells the story of the children of the Great Migration through the trials of one indomitable heroine (Hattie) and her unforgettable family. The novel has earned starred pre-publication reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and Booklist.

“The opening pages of Ayana’s debut took my breath away,” said Winfrey, OWN CEO, “I can’t remember when I read anything that moved me in quite this way, besides the work of Toni Morrison.”

In addition to being available in bookstores nationwide, special Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 digital editions of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, with exclusive content including a reader’s guide and Winfrey’s notes on her favorite passages, will be available for Amazon Kindle, NOOK by Barnes & Noble, on the iBookstore and everywhere e-books are sold.

The cross-platform book club’s second selection kicks off with Winfrey’s interview with Mathis in the January issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, where Mathis shares her reaction upon receiving the call from Winfrey revealing that her book had been chosen. “Really?” asked Mathis in disbelief, “This is really Oprah Winfrey?”

As readers complete their journey through The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, an exclusive interview with Winfrey and Mathis will simulcast Sunday, February 3 at 11 a.m. ET/PT on OWN’s Emmy Award-winning series “Super Soul Sunday,” on Oprah.com and OWN’s Facebook page and on Oprah Radio’s “Oprah’s Soul Series” (Sirius 204, XM 111).

Throughout December and January, readers can further engage online at the book club hub and through a variety of digital and social media platforms:

• Oprah.com will feature a series of original webisodes with Winfrey and Mathis, a reading guide as well as Winfrey’s personal thoughts about her favorite passages from the book.

• Readers will also have the opportunity to answer weekly questions via Twitter, Facebook and Instagram using the Mass Relevance platform. A stream of reader tweets (#OprahsBookClub), Facebook posts, and Instagram photos from around the world will provide a snapshot of what participants are thinking, feeling and sharing as they read the book together.

• Mathis will answer readers’ questions via the popular VYou social video platform.

• The official Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 group on Goodreads, one of the largest websites for book lovers with 13 million members, will feature content and encourage discussions about the new book club selection.

• Using the mobile messaging application GroupMe, Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 will encourage readers to create personal mobile book clubs with their friends.

Click here for a message from Oprah.

Image Courtesy : OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network

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It is no secret that we live in an age where it gets easier and easier to share our opinions with the world. It’s not just a matter of using Twitter to tell the world what you had for breakfast, or uploading duckface pictures of yourself to Facebook. Now, thanks to sites like Amazon and Goodreads, anyone can be a literary critic from the privacy of his or her bedroom.

Naturally, not everyone is thrilled by the brave new literary world we inhabit. The chairman of the Man Booker Prize judging panel, Sir Peter Stothard, recently made headlines when he launched an outspoken attack on amateur reviewers, claiming that readers would be better off listening to professional critics.

Sir Peter, who is also the editor of The Times Literary Supplement, was quoted in Britain’s Daily Telegraph saying that “[t]here is a general trend- and it’s certainly very prevalent online- for replacing argued literary criticism that allows you to compare books, to put them in context, to analyse how they work. That kind of traditional criticism is very easily replaced by unargued opinion.”

“Storytelling is fine but it doesn’t require Man Booker judges to decide what people are going to enjoy taking on holiday and reading on the beach,” he continued. “Books that are not immediately easy to read- the books that in the end will last, that reward you most- do increasingly require the Man Booker Prize judges to identify them so that people will find the pleasure and reward of reading them.”

It is not just established literary critics who have expressed concerns about the new frontier of social media-driven criticism. Some authors have sought to highlight the negative aspects of online reviews, claiming that they are being subject to campaigns of cyberbullying by disgruntled fans. Earlier this summer, there was a kerfuffle in the literary world over a website called StopTheGoodreadsBullies.com.

Writing in a guest post over at the Huffington Post’s blog, the people behind the site claimed that they were trying to fight back against people who used Goodreads to “destroy [an] author’s reputation and career for either their own personal amusement or for vengeance.”

“We want the toxic, bullying atmosphere at [Goodreads] to stop. And we want these people to be held accountable by public opinion,” they continued.

StopTheGoodreadsBullies itself has proved to be controversial. Because it often attempts to unmask individuals who are accused of engaging in bullying behavior, some critics have accused it of waging its own bullying campaign. As author Foz Meadows pointed out on her blog, “any public figure, regardless of whether they’re an author, actor, sportsperson or journalist, must resign themselves to a certain amount of public criticism. Not everyone will like you, your work or even necessarily your profession, and nor will they be under any obligation to protect your sensibilities by being coy about it.”

“Simply disliking a book, no matter how publicly or how snarkily, is not the same as bullying. To say that getting a handful of mean reviews is even in the same ballpark as dealing with an ongoing campaign of personal abuse is insulting to everyone involved,” Meadows continued.

But over at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, SB Sarah summed it up best when she pointed out that negative reviews are just part and parcel of being an author.

“We may have the most meanest critique partner in the world, but she is nothing to the reader who paid $9 for a book and was disappointed,” she said.

“This is what happens when readers read books: we get irate sometimes and giddy other times. Now we interact more about the giddy and the irate, and that interaction, positive or negative, is valuable. More importantly, it’s normal.”

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