I review books for a living — which these days makes me something of an anachronism. Reviews, once a way to think out loud about art, are increasingly treated as just another genre of marketing. Public declarations of enthusiasm have replaced engagement. Five stars have become the default. And somewhere in all that cheerleading, we’ve stopped asking the only question that really matters: Did the book work?
It’s not that readers don’t care. It’s that the critical space is being steadily drowned out by platforms that don’t value it — or worse, pretend to. Take Goodreads. It allows anyone to rate a book, whether or not they’ve read it. That’s not a bug; it’s policy. And it means a novel can be tanked by a grudge or lifted by a preorder impulse, long before it lands in anyone’s hands. The result? A flood of stars that signify nothing.
And yet, those stars drive the market. Publishers quote them. Retailers boost them. Authors are judged by them. But no one seems to be asking what they actually mean. When a thousand people rate a book “five stars!!!” without context, we’re not having a conversation. We’re performing a mood.
Part of the problem is economic. No one’s paying for real criticism anymore. BookTok doesn’t need a craft analysis when a teary reaction video will do. Influencers aren’t asked to assess; they’re asked to promote. And professional outlets — the ones that used to pay critics to evaluate books on their own terms — have cut coverage to the bone. We didn’t just lose critics. We stopped expecting them.
What we’re left with is a chorus of praise that’s easy to scroll through but hard to learn from. It’s not that joy is unwelcome. It’s that joy alone is insufficient. A critic can love a book and still question its structure. A critic can admire the voice and still wish the plot held together. That tension isn’t cruelty. It’s respect — for the reader, and for the work.
I don’t want every review to sound like mine. But I do want reviewing to mean something again. To be a space where we ask not only how a book made us feel, but what it tried to do — and whether it succeeded. If we give that up, what are we reading for?
What do we lose without criticism — and what do you think?
The post the ask@AAR: Can We Love Books and Still Be Honest? appeared first on All About Romance.
