A Criticism of Star Book Reviews

june 2 2025

I've been spending quite some time on The Storygraph lately sorting through my to-be-read (TBR) list. I feel like I've gotten much better at reading lately, since I can focus on books without all the noise from social media. It did make me think about how people talk about books on social media or online in general, though. When I talk about books with my friends, or browse the displays at the library, how many stars out of five people rate each book rarely comes up. But when I followed Bookstagrammers, the number of stars would be readily on display, whether it was in the graphic or the beginning or end of their post caption review. Even on The Storygraph, the average amount of stars the community has given a book helpfully appears right under its summary. But does relying on a simple metric like stars really help me?

There are several low-rated books that I have had a lot of fun with, and some highly rated books that I find awful. Social media tends to remove nuance, and the book community has not resisted the pull of the algorithm. There is so much more joy in picking up a book in the library whose premise is interesting to me personally, instead of choosing a book that an influencer rated five out of five stars. From now on, I'm going to try to pay less attention to the star ratings on The Storygraph, and you should too.

What reads are you looking forward to? I was so happy to see that Amal El-Mohtar has another book-- Seasons of Glass and Iron: Stories-- coming out next year!!! I still need to get to The River Has Roots. I'd also like to get to Gods of Want: Stories (K-Ming Chang), Metal from Heaven (August Clarke), and Split Tooth (Tanya Tagaq) this year. I also have a friend who wants to buddy read The Ninth Rain (Jen Williams) and highly recommends Robin Hobb's books. My most anticipated 2025 release is When They Burned the Butterfly by Wen-yi Lee. :)