One of the toughest things I have found as a new novelist is finding objective reviews. It seems that most friends and family members, as truthful as they may be, have insider information that makes it difficult to be unbiased. While I have received a few great reviews from people I did not know, I haven't received a large amount of bad ones. Which might be good, but then again, who wants to review a bad book?
But I just finished reading something in between: a review for "The Developers" by Gaby Arevalo from the University of Maryland-Baltimore County newspaper, The Retriever. Arevalo highlights the majority of the good and bad points in the book and gives a pretty good synopsis of what the book is about.
The end result: Arevalo writes that the book "falls short of its potential." I'll take to mean that the book was close to being a great book, but instead, it's decent.