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Well, to be fair to the reviewer, he did actually say that she had written a good story, and his main issue with the spelling and, more particularly, grammar errors was that they kept getting in the way of enjoying the story she'd written. He was very evenhanded in his review, I thought - if anything, it was a favorable review, except for commenting on the clunkiness of the grammar in places.
I don't know why she reacted as strongly as she did - it's possible she's dealing with other stuff in her life and living on an emotional hair trigger as a result. Even so, I was rather taken aback by the ferocity of her responses, and I'm afraid she didn't do herself any favours by asserting that the quoted sentences were absolutely fine. The response to her outburst, in terms of the massive numbers of negative reviews now landing on the book on Amazon, became inevitable as her outburst on the reviewer's blog attracted more and more attention. The Web is one of the most amazing developments in the last 20 years, but along with the great stuff it's made possible, it sadly makes it easy for the nastier side of human nature to run wild at times.
I just hope the author can extract, from amidst all the crap, the good advice she's received, learn from it, and move on to write better books in the future. Though she might, as some suggested in the blog discussion, have to consider using a pen name for future books, in order not to have them linked to this unfortunate episode.
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