Why I Think Book Reviews Should Be Honest Before They Are Kind

I need to say something that might make me unpopular in certain corners of the bookish internet: I don’t believe book reviews should be kind first. I believe they should be honest first. And I think the distinction matters more than most of us want to admit.

There’s a strain of thought running through online book communities—and it’s been growing stronger over the past few years—that goes something like this: Authors are real people with real feelings. Negative reviews hurt those feelings. Therefore, if you can’t say something nice, maybe you shouldn’t say anything at all. It’s the philosophy of the kindergarten classroom applied to literary criticism, and on its surface, it sounds reasonable enough. Decent, even. Who wants to be the person who made a writer cry into their morning coffee?

But here’s my problem with that approach: it treats book reviews as though they exist primarily to serve authors, when in reality, reviews exist to serve readers.

The Problem with Sugar-Coated Reviews

When we prioritize kindness over honesty, we don’t eliminate negativity—we just displace it. Instead of a clear, specific critique that helps a reader decide whether a book is right for them, we get vague five-star ratings accompanied by exclamation points and heart emojis that tell you absolutely nothing about what you’re about to spend fifteen dollars and twelve hours on. We get reviews that mention a book’s “pacing issues” when the truth is that the middle 200 pages are a slog. We get “not for me, but maybe you’ll love it!” as though every book deserves a participation trophy.

I’ve been reading and reviewing books for over a decade now, and I’ve watched this transformation happen in real time. The Amazon review section used to be a place where you could find substantive disagreements about a book’s merits. Now, the most helpful reviews are often buried under an avalanche of one-liners that could apply to any title in any genre. Goodreads has become a space where negative reviews are sometimes met with dogpiling from an author’s fanbase, or worse, from the author themselves.

The result? A review ecosystem that’s less useful, less trustworthy, and less interesting than it used to be.

What Honesty Actually Looks Like

Let me be clear about what I mean by honest reviews, because I think people sometimes confuse honesty with cruelty. An honest review is not a takedown. It’s not a clever exercise in demonstrating your wit at someone else’s expense. It’s not that one-star review that starts with “I would rather gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon than read another sentence from this hack.”

An honest review says: This book didn’t work for me, and here’s why.

It might say: “The premise promised a murder mystery, but the first half is actually a slow-burn romance, and I felt misled by the marketing.” Or: “The protagonist’s motivation never made sense to me, which made it hard to care about whether she succeeded.” Or simply: “I found the prose overwritten and the dialogue stiff.”

Those aren’t kind statements. But they’re also not cruel. They’re specific, they’re grounded in the text, and they give other readers information they can actually use. That’s what honesty looks like in practice—specificity delivered with respect for your audience’s time and intelligence.

The Difference Between Honesty and Meanness

I want to draw a line here that I think gets blurred too often. Honesty means telling the truth about your experience with a book. Meanness means telling that truth in a way designed to wound. The first is a service. The second is a performance.

When I write that a novel’s ending felt rushed, I’m being honest. When I write that the author clearly ran out of ideas and phoned it in, I’m being mean—because I’m no longer describing the book; I’m attacking the person who wrote it. There’s a world of difference between “the characters felt thin” and “the author clearly doesn’t understand human beings.” The first is criticism. The second is insult dressed up as insight.

The best reviewers I know—and I’m thinking of people like Michiko Kakutani in her long tenure at the Times, or the anonymous voices behind some of the most thoughtful Goodreads accounts I follow—understand this distinction instinctively. They don’t pull punches, but they also don’t throw punches that don’t need throwing.

Why Kindness Without Honesty Betrays the Reader

Every time I write a review that’s honest about a book’s flaws, I think about the person on the other end of that review. Not the author. The reader.

I think about the college student who’s working two jobs and can only afford one new book this month. I think about the parent who has exactly forty-five minutes of quiet between bedtime and exhaustion. I think about the person who reads to escape a life that’s harder than I can imagine, and who deserves to know that the thriller they hoped would carry them through the night falls apart in chapter twelve.

When we write reviews that are kind to authors but dishonest about their books, we betray those people. Every single one of them.

And yes, I know—that’s a lot of weight to put on a book review. But the collective weight of all those reviews adds up. When our review culture shifts toward positivity for positivity’s sake, we create an environment where every book is “a stunning debut” and every flawed protagonist is “morally complex” rather than “poorly drawn.” We make it harder for readers to separate the books that will genuinely move them from the books that will leave them cold. We make it harder for the good books to rise, because we’ve flattened the curve until everything sounds the same.

How to Be Both Honest and Kind (When You Can)

Here’s where I’ll admit that the binary I’ve set up—honesty versus kindness—isn’t entirely fair. Because sometimes you can be both. Sometimes honesty and kindness overlap in ways that make the review stronger, not weaker.

You can acknowledge what a book is trying to do even as you explain why it falls short. You can celebrate a writer’s ambition even when the execution doesn’t match it. You can say “this clearly wasn’t for me, but I can see why it would work for someone who loves X” and have that be a genuine statement rather than a cop-out.

The key word there is genuine. Kindness is only meaningful when it’s honest. Praise is only useful when it’s specific. And if you can’t find anything kind to say that’s also true, then honesty has to come first. Every time.

When Honesty and Kindness Can’t Coexist

There are books—rare, but real—where the kindest thing I can say is that the author clearly finished it, and I suspect that’s not the book’s strongest selling point. There are books where every potential positive is undercut by a flaw so significant that mentioning the positive feels misleading. There are books that are actively harmful in their representations of people and communities, and in those cases, kindness would mean silence, and silence would mean complicity.

In those moments, I write the honest review. Because my obligation is to the person who might pick up that book expecting one thing and getting another. My obligation is to the reader who deserves to know what they’re getting into. My obligation is to the literary conversation that only works when people are willing to say what they actually think.

I don’t enjoy writing negative reviews. My heart always sinks a little when I close a book knowing I’m going to have to be the one who says it didn’t work. But I do it anyway, because I think that’s what reviewing means. That’s what criticism is. And if we’re not willing to be honest about what doesn’t work, then our praise for what does becomes meaningless—a currency inflated to worthlessness by its own abundance.

Frequently Asked Questions

What if the author is my friend?

This is the question I get more than any other, and my answer is simple: if the friendship can’t survive an honest review, then either the friendship or the review has to go. I don’t review books by close friends because I don’t think I can be unbiased, and a biased review—whether positive or negative—isn’t useful to anyone. If you’re asked to review a friend’s book and you can’t be honest, decline. If you’re asked to review a friend’s book and you can be honest, proceed—but let your readers know the relationship upfront. Transparency isn’t unkind. It’s essential.

How do I write a negative review without being cruel?

Focus on the book, not the person. Always. Write about what’s on the page, not about what you imagine the author was thinking or feeling when they wrote it. Be specific about what didn’t work rather than making sweeping dismissals. And before you publish, read your review back and ask yourself: “If someone wrote this about a book I loved, would I find it fair?” If the answer is yes, you’re probably in the right territory.

Should I review books I didn’t finish?

Yes, but with caveats. A DNF review should be clear about how far you got and why you stopped. It shouldn’t make claims about the book’s ending or overall trajectory. And it should acknowledge that your experience is incomplete. That said, a reader who gives up on a book after 100 pages has valuable information to share—information about pacing, early characterization, prose style, and whether the book delivers on its promise. That information is useful to other readers who might share your sensibilities, and it deserves to be part of the conversation.

I’ve been writing about books long enough to have received angry emails from authors, to have been called a hater in comment sections, and to have been told that I’m “destroying the literary community” by being honest about my reading experiences. I’ve also received emails from readers thanking me for saving them time, for articulating something they felt but couldn’t quite express, and for making them feel seen in their frustrations with books that everyone else seemed to love.

Those emails are why I keep writing honest reviews. Not because I enjoy being negative—anyone who’s read my work knows I’d rather rave about a book I loved than pick apart one I didn’t. But because I believe that honesty is the foundation on which any meaningful literary community is built. Without it, we’re just performing enthusiasm for each other, and calling it connection.

Be kind when you can. Be honest when you must. And never, ever, let kindness become an excuse for dishonesty. The readers deserve better. The books deserve better. And honestly? So do the authors—even if they don’t know it yet.