Adding reviews to a database of books and authors

This is a pure design question. I have a library database (MS Access). Books can be part of a series (1:m). Books can have parts (1:m). Books have authors (m:m). Parts have authors (1:m). Now I want to add reviews to the database. But a review can be about a series, a book, a part, an author or a partAuthor. At this moment, I have different Review tables for each case. This makes it difficult (impossible?) to show reviews as one list (sorted on date for example). How can I get all reviews in one table? Like a 1:m to the different tables. I have autonumbers in there...

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There are many ways that this can be done, but the simplest way I can think of would be to create a reviewSubjects table. It would have an AutoNumber PK (Primary Key), and an FK (Foreign Key) for each type of review (like series, book, and author). This gets a little ugly if you have to join beyond this table to produce a comprehensive result set to address every type of review, but that is a design decision that you may not have to make.

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This was first published in February 2002

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