Erica Meltzer's books have come onto the scene in the past few years with great reviews. Her books are fantastic for the subjects they cover—Reading and Writing. She's published two books for the SAT—The Complete Guide to SAT Critical Reading, and The Ultimate Guide to SAT Grammar.
While these are high quality books, they're not perfect, for reasons we'll explain in this article. Keep reading to figure out whether these books are appropriate for you, and whether you should integrate these as part of your personal prep program.
When you get advice on the internet, it's important to understand why you should believe the advice you're receiving. Because your SAT score is important, follow the wrong advice, and it might be too late to improve your score.
To be transparent, here’s why you might be able to trust this review more than others:
One disclaimer: I’m co-founder of PrepScholar, an online SAT/ACT prep program. I believe we’ve built the best prep program available right now. It diagnoses your strengths and weaknesses and gives you a structured all-in-one program, combining the best aspects of the books below, so you know exactly what you need to study at every point.
But I want to stress that you don’t need a program to excel at the SAT. In fact, writing this guide may lose us some customers, since you might decide that you don’t need a program at all. But if you decide that you don’t want to manage 10 books and want an integrated complete program that customizes to your learning, check PrepScholar SAT out.
When I consider the quality of a book, I think about a few important questions:
Erica's books are clearly high quality—they made my list of Best SAT Prep Books 2015. But they do have their shortcomings, which we'll discuss below.
Erica Meltzer started as a tutor and eventually published her SAT and ACT prep books in the past few years. Erica also graduated from Wellesley College, which is a prestigious college ranked #4 of all liberal arts colleges in the country. While she seems not to tutor much currently, her books show that she has a great deal of expertise on the SAT and ACT.
In my experience with thousands of students, SAT Reading is the most difficult section to improve. It uses logical reasoning skills that aren’t as easily mastered as math concepts or grammar rules. It’s very important to drill down on what types of questions are asked, and how to approach these questions in a systematic way.
Erica's book dissects the SAT Reading section by question type and skill. She does a great job of teaching the core of what the question is asking, and how to work with the passage to arrive at the correct answer. Of all writers, Erica Meltzer aligns most closely with my personal philosophy of drilling questions skill-by-skill to recognize patterns to questions.
The book is very thorough—in fact, it's too thorough for the average student. It goes into every nook and cranny, and if you're scoring below a 650, this is NOT the best book to use. If you're a student gunning for a perfect SAT score, though, this is a good book to drill comprehensively and to perfection.
Furthermore, this book requires a lot of work to get through. At 350 large pages, it'll take most students 15 hours or more to get through this book. If you don't have a lot of time to prep, you won't be able to get the most out of this book.
Pros:
Cons:
This is currently my favorite book for the SAT Reading section. If you're planning on scoring a 700 or above on the Reading section and prefer to study by books, this is a great option. It's more expensive than average and it's too thorough for many students, but it's a great choice that will teach you a lot.
Overall Rating: 88/100
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