The assignment of books for review has always been haphazard. Fellow fiction writers can be tempted either to undermine the competition, or to flatter colleagues who might later judge prizes or provide boosting blurbs. There are no clear qualifications for book reviewing — perhaps publication, but most of all, because reviewers are paid for their text but not for the many hours it takes to read the bleeding books, a willingness to work for atrocious wages.
Mitigating the gravity of this matter? Aside from the authors whose work is on the block, almost no one reads book reviews, and I say that as someone who writes a fair number. It’s a publishing truism that ‘reviews don’t sell books’ — although negative ones can un-sell books. With lose-lose odds like that, why books are ever shipped out for review is anyone’s guess.
The lofty New York Times seeks to prevent literary back-scratching by making reviewers swear on pain of excommunication that they are not friends with the author (the test being whether you’ve dined together). With young adult titles, Kirkus, an American trade journal that can influence library and bookshop orders, has raised the moral purity bar still further.
YA fiction reviewers must identify all characters by race, religion and sexual orientation. (Kirkus reviews are only 200 words. After all that ‘African-American, lapsed Buddhist, male-to-female transgender with a foot fetish’, I’m amazed there’s any wordage left.) Should authors have been stupid enough to include a ‘diverse’ cast, their books will be assigned to ‘own voices’ reviewers — that is, other African-American, lapsed Buddhist, male-to-female transgenders with foot fetishes — the better to ‘call out’ writers guilty of any crimes of the imagination on the burgeoning list of progressive no-nos.
Laura Moriarty’s American Heart is a dystopian tale about a white 15-year-old girl who meets an Iranian academic on the run and comes to realise that America’s corralling all its Muslims into internment camps is not very nice.
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