Hannah: Mr Quill. I wasn't sure you would speak to me.
Rufus: Why not? You wrote the most honest review of my life.
Hannah: I wrote that the plot "moves like a patient glacier".
Rufus: And that the second chapter "could be used to calm a nervous horse". I read it aloud to my editor. She laughed.
Hannah: I'm sorry. I try to be fair, but I also try to be funny, and they are not always the same effort.
Rufus: It was fair. Four hundred pages was too many. Please don't apologise.
Hannah: That's very generous.
Rufus: It isn't generosity. It's vanity. A bad review that is well written is still a review I can quote.
Hannah: Then you must have a favourite sentence.
Rufus: Of course. "Not a single character is memorable." It helped me a lot.
Hannah: How?
Rufus: It made me realise that the readers love one character very much. The dog.
Hannah: Oh... I did like the dog.
Rufus: Everyone does. The dog is in the sequel. It's only two hundred pages.
Hannah: Is that a threat?
Rufus: It's an invitation. Would you review it?
Fiction note: All people, places and events in this dialogue are fictional.