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?
We need good critics. How else are we going to know whether that book, movie, other form of art, toy, sofa, or whatever, is worth not just the money, but the time, interest, and effort. That being said, we should always take what a critic says as just their opinion and decide for ourselves. What people like and want is very subjective. You’re right, we see a lot of five star or one star reviews these days, and for the most part they aren’t very helpful. I like to see what the two, three, and four star reviews say. When it comes to books, I’ve learned to rely on a few trusted reviewers, favorite authors, and gut instinct. Gut instinct sometimes leads me in unexpected directions that can be delightful, or just a waste of time. Back before online reviews, I used to read the blurb on the back cover to see if a book was interesting. That method actually worked pretty well. I found that recommendations from friends or best seller lists was not reliable because of personal preferences. One reason I’ve been following AAR since the mid 1990s was because I trust your reviews. I can’t say that I’ve agreed with all of them, but I appreciate the time and effort you guys put into providing honest reviews on a broad range of romances and other genres of books. I know it’s gotten harder with several authors leaving the genre, but I’d love to see some more reviews of historical romances. There are still good ones out there.
We would lose so much without honest reviews! I value reivews. If I read a review that is thoughtfully and insightfully written I am more likely to take it seriously even if I’m not familiar with the reviewer. Still, if I’m not familiar with the reviewer, I will definitely try to find some reviews of the same book by people I already follow. If a book isn’t written by one of my auto-buy authors, then I do not buy books without vetting them through my short list of trusted reviewers.
Everyone has opinions, and I’m fine with people disagreeing with me on a book I like or don’t, as long as the reasons have substance. A good reviewer should be aware of their biases. I really dislike manipulative family in my romance books, so when I review a book I’m downgrading due to the disliked content, I am up front that this is my bias, and YMMV. I also don’t tank a grade for that.
Any reviewer that always likes what they read makes me uncomfortable. I feel like that person is either not reviewing the books they didn’t like, or they aren’t very decerning about writing skills or well-done plots. That’s absolutely fine for them as an individual. I’m happy for them to enjoy lots of variation in quality. But it’s not very helpful for someone reading reviews in order to decide what to buy.
I definitely appreciate a critical reader’s review that justifies her reaction to a book. The 5-star rating system is meaningless when applied to stories, which are more than objects or tools. Stories are experiences that can’t be measured like the sucking power of a vacuum or the effectiveness of a nonstick baking sheet. Everyone wants a vacuum to clean up the dirt. Everyone wants the food cooked in a nonstick pan to not stick. Not every reader wants a story to be <fill in the blank>. Different readers are looking for a list of different experiences when they read, and a book’s viral popularity is fairly low on the list. Star ratings don’t address this issue.
I noticed the shift in reviewing begin with the rise of indie publishing + personal websites (early online influencers?), when book review sites popped up and turned reviewing into self-expression, the reader hanging up an online shingle and sharing deeply personal opinions about books based on little more than liking or disliking a book. Some “reviewers” even substituted gifs for what once was expected: thoughtful written analysis. As early as 2012, many of the reader reviews on Goodreads were mocking and mean, not because the books were bad, but because the goal was to attract followers rather than share analysis of a book, which the reviewer often received free, adding insult to injury.
I guess we might be grateful that most of what passes for reviews on #booktalk and elsewhere online is friendly and enthusiastic, even if it isn’t particularly helpful to readers. I’ve purchased and read quite a few books thanks to the civil, astute reviews on this site. Thank you. Ratings cannot replace analysis, positive or negative, nor the depth of knowledge and experience AAR reviewers bring to the industry. I hope AAR is around for a long time to come.
That’s such an important point.
I see posts by reviewers encouraging others to leave positive reviews of books by their favourite authors – because it helps the author. Which isn’t the point of reviews. Good ones will, hopefully, help an author in terms of visibility and sales, but being guilted into leaving a good review “to help the author” ultimately benefits no-one in the long run. If AAR gives a DIK to a book that isn’t very good, the consumer will a) not read that author again and b) not trust AAR again. That’s why it’s got to be about honesty and about a reviewer being able to articulate what worked/didn’t work for them so readers have accurate information. The first thing I do if I see a book has loads of 5 star gushy reviews on Amazon or Goodreads is look at the 2 and 3 star ones or look elsewhere – although as I said upthread, finding other reliable sources of honest reviews is difficult.
Yes we can, full stop on that one.
Selene’s post already touched on the main point I would make. Full reviews, unlike star or number ratings, mention more aspects of the stories, giving potential readers more chances to see something important for their personal selection criteria. I started reading romances a few decades ago with a strong bias for romances with humor, and I still look for any mention of humor in reviews (or angst to avoid). This only has a low success rate due to the uniqueness of all of our senses of humor, but it has added several authors to my auto-buys over the years.
Many years ago a list I was on discussed a possible checklist for stories:
Title – Author:
Format: HC/TP/MMP/E-B – Publisher -Year:
Genre:
Sub-genre and themes:
Setting(s) (times/places):
Overall Grade (A+ – F):
1-10 Humorous style:
1-10 Light to serious issues content:
1-10 Kisses to burning sensuality (or subtle to hot):
1-10 Poor, middle class, rich protagonists:
1-10 Untitled, titled, royal protagonists:
0-10 Internal conflict:
0-10 External conflict:
0-10 Secretive hero:
0-10 Secretive heroine:
0-10 Portion of text devoted to babies & children:
0-10 Portion of text devoted to appearance & clothing:
0-10 Level of action/adventure:
0-10 Level of angst:
0-10 Level of male-bashing:
0-10 Level of mystery:
0-10 Level of paranormal activity:
0-10 Level of suspense:
0-10 Level of violence:
Forced seductions/rapes:
Animal characters:
Accuracy (historical or other):
Hero background/profession/type, age if known:
Heroine background/profession/type, age if known:
Believable HEA ending:
Series (Y/N & reading order):
If yes previous titles:
Errata:
Additional Comments:
The problem with any such checklist is that it can never cover every possible interest or selection criterion the way an essay-style review does. They are an expansion of the basic failure of star ratings. Potential readers till need the kind of long review AAR has done for many years.
I hope so!
I really love this post, because it expresses something that it has always existed but now is bigger phenomenon. Talking just about internet, there has always been sites and bloggers who make publicity, only publicity, ‘all the books are great, magnificent, the greatest, you have to read it’.
Let’s talk about my personal experience with romance novels written in Spanish. There’s no AAR for us! What the influencers do in BookTok or Tiktok or Instagram or any of those places now is what many ‘readers’ have been doing in Spanish webpages and blogs for years: publicity, promotion, merchandising, marketing. Not serious reviews. As I say before –’Everything is great, all the novels are perfect, you will fall in love with these characters, go and buy it’.
Only a handful of blogs do really talk about romance novels saying if they were good or bad, the quality of the writing, if the dialogues are fluid or not, if they are well researched but without infodump, how well the plots are developed, what does that book mean in the context of the production of a certain author, those things. They talk about their personal and real experience, and explain why they think this or that.
As a curiosity, I can tell you that even if we write in Spanish, we tend to use many English words and expressions precisely because we have not developed a language of our own to analyze seriously a romance novel.
What I have seen in the ‘Spanish Romantic Blogosphere’ for years is exactly what you describe that is happening now all around the world.
What do I do, as a reader? Well, I tend to ignore the majority of social media, although I’m in Goodreads. (for romance novels) and Babelio (for literary fiction and essays). But 5-star reviews in GR are not usually very helpful in order to know if a certain book is worth your time and money.
To decide what to buy, I prefer places like AAR, with clever reviews that really talk to me about the books, its strengths and its flaws as the reviewer sees them. They are the only ones really useful. Many people who read my blog say thank you! precisely for this. They say that my reviews have helped them when they want to find good romance novels. That’s when I’m most happy, when I have been useful to the readers. I do it just for fun, I’m not a professional reviewer, without the risk of bias or conflicts of interest. I do not replace serious places in my own language because I feel they do not exist.
All those media you mention are useful to the publishing houses or the authors, not the readers. Influencers work for them, not for the consumer. But I think the majority of people see this, don’t they?
So I guess that full reviews (not 15-second ads in TikTok) are still useful to readers.
I’m currently reading a book by a movie critic called The Wisdom Pyramid. He talks about how his years of experience in film analysis, college degree in the subject, and hundreds of hours of viewing are equated with anyone who can give a snarky, funny take on Instagram or Twitter (yes, I know the new name, no I won’t call it that.). The volume is actually about how social media is damaging our brains, our souls, our relationships, etc., but his discussion of how we now equate a personal opinion with an expert one really struck a nerve with me. He even tackled my personal pet peeve — commenting without reading/watching/seeing. People will judge a book/movie/TV show based on someone else’s biased take – often done to earn the poster social media/virtue cred – without finding out for themselves how the author/producer actually tackled the subject they found so offensive. I’m going to read The Death of Expertise next which looks at how our elevating personal opinions has led to the creation of alternative facts, which are not in fact facts.
TBH, I personally would not like a review from someone with a subject in film/book analysis. After all, I generally dislkike critically acclaimed classics. I would not call myself uneducated, I just really prioritize something else when I need to relax and read for personal enjoyment. So from my point of view “death of expertise” in the area of book/film reviews is actually an excellent thing, this means that I can find reviewers who have similar tastes to me.
A friend of mine did a PhD of literary analysis of romance. When we talk about books we enjoyed, we often like some really different books. She is a true expert: she pointed me out some things about underlying basis of Mary Balogh which were really insightful (and explain why I like some of her book so much, given my general world view). But she told me once that when she reads books with a goal of text analysis for, say, publishing a paper, then it’s not reading for enjoyment and she “switched off” the part as a reader, she was focused on underlying patterns. I highly respect her work and her insight, and I enjoy talking books with her, but if she was writing a book review blog as AAR, I wouldn’t necessarily use that, or at least I would treat recommendations with a grain of salt. I would trust her to be honest but I would also know that what she likes is not what I like.
I don’t want to come across as nitpicky, so I apologize if this comes across that way, but a book review and a literary analysis are two different things. A literary analysis is done for academic purposes, and a book review (such as those done by Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and AAR) is meant to convey information and an opinion about a specific volume. Even though many book reviews can (and should ) be critical, they are not considered to be scholarly literary criticism. Literary criticism contains much more in-depth analysis and evaluation than a book review, covering areas of concern or content that a reviewer may not have time for, evaluating prose and execution at a higher level, and can often include judgment of the genre and its expectations that a review would most likely not.
I read reviews specifically because I value how I spend my free time. I’m not looking for a literary analysis of things I read for entertainment because I personally don’t want to think that hard about stuff I’m picking up for fun. Still, I also don’t want to waste precious money on crap. And the romance genre puts a lot of that out every year. I found AAR 20 odd years ago because I was the mom of young children who couldn’t spend time in the bookstore pre-reading the first few chapters of a book, only to get home and find out the thing fell apart in the middle and had a bad ending. I’ve saved time, money, and emotional angst just by checking out what people who love to read and know the genre well think about a volume (thanks, AAR!). Amazon stars (and increasingly GoodReads star ratings) can be valueless because they are posted by friends, family, etc. of the author who are just anxious to get her a good rating. Finding a review there that explains what is bad about a book or great about it is taking more and more time.
I can certainly understand that what we do here isn’t for everyone. Some folks just want to read a romance about a small town bakery owner who falls for the local bad boy, and if a novel hits that sweet spot, they don’t need to know more. But for those of us who do want a little more, a place like this is nirvana.
Once upon a time, many years ago, I was teaching a 12th grade English class, and the question of quality came up. The students insisted that they could tell a good poem from a bad or mediocre one. So that evening I wrote a Shakespearean sonnet, filled with Elizabethan cliches, and the next day I gave it to them along with “Let me not to the marriage of true minds…” I asked them which one was Shakespeare and which one was mine. They had trouble doing so.
I think of that when I see hundreds or even thousands of five-star reviews basically saying “I love it!” Saying you enjoy something is not the same as saying it is good. You may love canned meatballs and spaghetti, but if you’ve never had the real thing, I’m not accepting you as a qualified judge.
One of my life’s goals is to keep AAR on line forever just so there is a site where people can read critical reviews of romance. The site has reviews by people who’ve read and reviewed hundreds of romances over time—we’re not influencers, we offer informed guidance.
“The site has reviews by people who’ve read and reviewed hundreds of romances over time– we’re not influencers, we offer informed guidance”
Hear, Hear! And long may you continue to do so
And that’s why I come here!
The short answer is, of course, yes. I do it all the time (I hope!). The problem, as others here have said is that “reviewing” isn’t the same as “rating” – and actual reviews that talk about things that are important to those readers trying to decide whether to purchase a book or not are becoming harder to find in those places that shout loudest (booktok etc.). I’ve said before that the main reason I rarely review on Amazon is that I’m fed up with my reviews, which I put time and effort into, being given the same weight as 5 star “OMG so hawtt!!” one.
There’s been a trend for quite a while of people not wanting to write negative reviews – which is a shame, as a well expressed critical review can be most useful when making those purchasing decisions. Like most people, I don’t want to waste time reading a book I don’t like, but if I’ve accepted it for review I will slog on and regard getting to vent my spleen in the review as compensation!
Goodreads has its problems, but it’s one of the few places these days you can find useful, critical reviews among the gushing 5 star-ers.
Yeah, but the site is set up to make you just notice the stars which anyone can post. I think it’s actually bad for books in many ways.
For marketers it – and Amz – are all about the stars. Personally, I take little notice of them and look for what people are actually saying – which I recognise isn’t what publishers etc. are paticularly interested in. But GR is one of the few places you can still find decent, long-form reviews all in one place.
I agree it’s nonsensical for them to allow books to be rated before they’re out there to actually read, but I’m not sure how that can be policed given that a lot of people have ARCs and post reviews before the release date.
I love and will always love books and reading. So reviews are the icing on the cake for me; there is no possibility of reviews – of any kind or anywhere – stopping me reading until I am at the Pearly Gates and, if there is a wait for them to open, I do hope I have my kindle with me!
I reviewed for maybe 8 or 9 years om Amazon, starting around the early 2000s. At that time, there was feedback for reviews and some interesting discussions, like the threads here, started and I found them interesting to read and sometimes participate in, especially on my own reviews. There was almost a community of like-minded reviewers whose contributions I valued and whose tastes marched with mine and that led me to new authors, etc. However, once feedback stopped, reviewing was not quite so rewarding. As others have pointed out here, the thoughtful, considered, well argued reviews – and I always took great care with one or two star reviews – became swallowed up into the stats along with the ignorant and stupid “Loved this book” reviews. I have never accepted a freebie for review and declined Amazon’s offer to be a prime sort of “important” or whatever it was called, reviewer; I felt it imperative to offer an unbiased, totally honest review, argued properly and with careful composition, correct grammar, no spelling mistakes, etc. But it became pointless so I stopped.
In the last few years I have reviewed only a handful of books on Amazon, one or two because I felt they made important statements and a few romances because the authors struck me as hidden treasures for one reason or the other and deserved my attention. I have submitted a few reviews at AAR because the authors were totally under the radar here
The latest wheeze at Amazon is the AI written “summary” at the top of the reviews. What BS. Who asked for this? There are plenty of readers who have (or had) the ability to write excellent reviews but, for myself, I don’t want to compete with AI in any way whatsoever. (Fingers in ears, sticking tongue out)
AAR provides excellent reviews in the main. I am only sorry that some of my favourite sub-genres are no longer so popular and don’t appear in reviews very often and some sub-genres are just not on my wavelength though I do read the reviews but am not often tempted to read the books. That’s fine – the point is that someone here at AAR has taken the time and trouble to review the book and this will help others in the community.
I don’t bother much with Goodreads. Perhaps I should make more effort. I just log my reads and occasionally read the reviews but, overall, the better quality of reviews are here at AAR and my thanks to those who write them, edit them, publish them and keep the ball rolling.
I agree with so much of what has been written by both Dabney and the commenters here – we value critical appraisal.
I stopped looking at Amazon reviews during the Harriet Klausner days, and GoodReads became mostly useless with Amazon’s purchase of it. I’m not a generic social media user, so have no idea what is happening at TikTok or Instagram or FB unless it is discussed elsewhere. I’m completely dependent on word of mouth, bookstore or library staff recommendations, and sites like AAR for book recommendations – especially for romances. In fact, it is the combination of reviews/blog posts AND SITE COMMENTS that make AAR worth my time. (Which is why I try to take the time to leave current comments for old reviews and posts – especially for reviews for which all the original comments have been lost. So readers new to the title have some idea whether or not a title holds up.) All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I value AAR and what it offers.
But AAR isn’t any more immune to the economic reality of “ratings” than any other (book) site because book publishers want high “grades” and “DIK read” labels in exchange for books to review. To a lesser extent, purchases are also key – ironically, probably something other than books, at this point. My personal book purchases may be driven by the content of reviews and comments, and NOT ratings, but let’s face it. High grades certainly don’t hurt the likelihood of purchases.