10 Things I Hate About Starred Book Reviews

Dining with professional colleagues, perhaps in the aftermath of the pandemic and continuing WFH, doesn’t happen as often as it did when I first came into publishing (and I never mastered a one-martini lunch, let alone three).

Still, whenever I am across the table from a publisher or editor or marketing director—or even an author or illustrator—there is only one low-hanging question that the person plucks from the air.

“Why wasn’t [insert book title here] starred?”

It's a fair question.

Our reviewer loved it. Perhaps in the context of the 12 books the reviewer covered for us that year, it was the best of the bunch. The review practically emotes the arguments for the superiority of the title. The writing is persuasive, the purchase recommendation coming in just short of “If you don’t buy this book I will personally come to your library and put it on the shelf for you.” It’s like Banned Books, in reverse.

But no star. In a voice full of regret, a publisher of an eponymous imprint once said the quiet part out loud over wine and a beautiful bowl of pasta: “I guess they can’t all be stars, right?”

To be clear, this is not an article about how SLJ arrives at the star decision. You can watch this video for some of the answers from current and former editors of the book review.

They can’t all be stars. Sometimes I wish none of them were.

When I was the children’s review editor at Kirkus Reviews, the system of granting books “pointers” or diamonds, was relatively new. Across all publications in the U.S. for decades, book reviews were published without any sort of star system at all. And lot of great books made their way, without it, to the podium.

[Watch: How Books Get Their Stars]

For me, the tyranny of starred reviews begins and ends with these 10 problems:

1. Comparison is the death of contentment. A starred review sets up other noteworthy titles to appear as “less than.” We all know about “less than.”
2. Give or take a few people, the same amount of work goes into a book that is starred as one that is not starred. Despite their combined herculean efforts to just get the damn thing published, people fruitlessly wonder, “What else could we have done?”
3. Authors and editors start to view their “children,” the books, in compartments: The ones that were starred and the ones that were not. We lose the phrase “body of work” to this stamp of excellence that is really simply a marketing designation.
4. A starred review determines budget. A book needs a quota of starred reviews, sometimes, before it can get the support of advertising dollars. Other books deserve to be amplified.
5. A star is like a shorthand that leads to purchasing decision, and occasionally the shorthand is the only part of the missive that is read. The reviews of other splendid titles, or mediocre titles that fill a collection hole, are moot.
6. Starred reviews provide momentum to titles as we hurdle annually toward awards seasons. Those titles that make it to the awards funnel are but a fraction of books compared to the riches published each season. But no one is glancing at the riches just beyond the stars.
7. A tangent of that last problem: Committees both do and do not take the stars into account, but few of us can stare at a starred book and think, “It’s probably not as good as that, let’s skip.” This happens all the time to “unstarred” books. They don’t get picked up and read. They don’t make the cut. But with exceptions, they very much deserve to be in the process all the way to the end.
8. A starred review is a snapshot of several opinions at a given moment and yet the star is forever in the book’s life. But sometimes a book that is starred does not stand up to the test of time. It may be that politics, styles, attitudes, or knowledge-bases have changed, or even that the best book of that month is not necessarily the best book of that year.
9. A starred review casts dispersions on a book creator’s entire body of work. I have heard a Caldecott-winner say in the moment of winning that he wished he’d received the award for an earlier work. Star reviews cast the same doubts on the non-starred ones. And many of these are worthy, glorious, perfect books.
10. The number one reason I find a starred book review tyrannical is not about glory and perfection. The starred book will get to a lot of readers. The one right next to it, without the star, may never find the one reader who needs it most.

“They cannot all be stars.” So maybe none of them should be. We are all, to a fault, mission-driven people. I love the work. I believe in the work. But there are days when the work hurts.