“Critically Acclaimed”: What a Difference a Couple Decades Makes

It wasn't so long ago that the words “critically acclaimed” meant: people with background and experience in literature, who read and review books professionally, recommend this. Perhaps your definition of 'critically acclaimed' differs slightly, and perhaps your opinion would differ from an individual critic's, but the idea that the book had been scrutinized from a variety of angles with an eye toward objectivity was core. It wasn't a hot take, or how cool the magic system is, or whether the book checks the right DEI boxes, yaddah yaddah yaddah. It was something more fundamental, a basic litmus test. The result was, books you may not personally enjoy will have the 'critically acclaimed' sticker but those books at least do fundamentals correctly, likely with something a little more. In today's world “critically acclaimed” means little.

People much more famous than me have stated that the internet is the democratization of worldviews. What I take this to mean is that popular opinion holds sway. How much? Hard to say. But what can be said with certainty is that the voice of critics with the clout to proclaim acclaim has dwindled in power due to the internet. Anybody with a youtube account or Reddit login can be a critic these days and get as many if not more eyes. I lament that much of this content, if not the majority of it, does not have the background, experience, or objective mindset that being a book critic requires. The bell curve of quality has been flattened.

And it's specific to the written word. There is something in our stupid human brains that sees a collection of words printed nicely on a screen or page and automatically gives weight to them, regardless the author. Joe writes it's good, must be good! Watching a video review doesn't trigger stupidity to the same degree—at least in me. There is something about seeing and hearing as opposed to reading a review that makes us/me more likely to spot idiots. Tell me a book is good, and I require convincing. But write a few positive words on screen, and the brain starts nodding. Strange, that. And all this is without getting into the myriad fake reviews online, the democratization—ahem, capitalization—of opinion diarrhea.

And so where the gates of experience and education used to protect critics (a good and bad thing), those gates have been torn down by the internet. The barbarians are storming in. Everybody can be a critic today. It follows that anything can be 'critically acclaimed'. Lonely Luke can gush in front of his bookshelf about the latest middle-of-the-road YA novel for its “complex characters”, and Sally Sue can run on and on how she loved Character X in the latest romantasy but hated Character Y because she couldn't connect with them. It especially pains me seeing a person declare the Greatest Science Fiction Novels of All Time!!!! when they've read only 150 in their life, and all published the past ten years. Sure, some of these people have the grace to say 'These are just my opinions', but rarely if ever do they have the grace to add '...of the 150 science fiction books I've read, these are the best.' It's just not as solid a benchmark as a person who has read hundreds and hundreds across the decades, not to mention been required to critique themselves as part of a language program. But such is the state of reviewdom.

So my advice to you these days, at a minimum, is to not trust a reviewer who cannot be critical. If they cannot find something to negatively critique on a regular basis, it's likely that education and experience (the trademarks of old school critics) are lacking, and the opinion needs to be taken with a shaker of salt. Likewise, be wary the critique which hinges on emotional response. These are almost always accompanied by loads of our favorite pronoun 'I' and the actual verb 'feel'. It's among these thickets of feeling that kickbacks lurk—reviewers looking for advanced release copies or for whom clicks equals money. They won't always have your reading interests at heart. I do. <cue evil laugh>