67 cringe-worthy clichés of book reviewing

A dishonor roll of the shameless hype used by critics, wittily decoded by their peers and by publishing insiders

May 16, 2025

Bingo card by Paraic O’Donnell, author of *The House on Vesper Sands* and other novels available here

You might think that if anyone would recognize a publishing cliché, it’s Gilbert Cruz, the editor of the New York Times Book Review. Or you might think that if he didn’t, an alert copy editor would jump in to say, “Hey, don’t we have some pride left here at America’s newspaper of record?”

If you thought either of those, you’d have learned otherwise from Cruz’s recent interview in the Times with Isabel Allende. He introduced it by saying that Allende’s first novel, The House of the Spirits, had been “a runaway bestseller.”

I don’t know how long “runaway bestseller” has been a cliché, but a variant may have existed when Shakespeare’s First Folio went on sale in London in 1623. If it’s not the oldest on record, it’s only because there’s a lot of competition for the title.

So many clichés were blighting reviews by the time I began editing the book section of a large newspaper that I made a preemptive strike against them. I sent every freelance critic a list of trite words or phrases that, I implied darkly, were never going to land in a half million muddy driveways each Sunday.

But new clichés kept arriving. I wanted to shout, whenever Michiko Kakutani called a book “affecting” in Times: “Well, how did it affect you, Michi: Did it make you want to vomit or to kiss the pages?”

As for that weasel word “compelling”: Robert Silvers, the late editor of the New York Review of Books, used to ask: “Compelled to do what?”

One day I’d had enough. I asked publishing veterans on the old Twitter—editors, agents, critics, and authors—to decode words like “absorbing,” “luminous,” and “provocative” along with phrases such as “a promising debut” and “in the proud tradition of J.R.R. Tolkien.”

To inspire the pros, I tossed out some of my translations of empty catchphrases or euphemisms. I collected the most memorable in a post last year on Medium and have revised and expanded it for this 2025 Substack edition.

Many terms on the following alphabetical list first surfaced in press releases from book publicists or marketers and spread to overeager reviewers. Here are 67 of my favorite definitions from the pros, including bestselling authors like

Jennifer Weiner

, winners of major awards like

Katha Pollitt

, and top executives at publishing firms.

“absorbing”: “makes a great coaster” @DonLinn, publishing consultant

“accessible”: “not too many big words” @MarkKohut, writer and consultant

“acclaimed”: “poorly selling”

Dr Syntax

, former editorial director of Bloomsbury Press and author of What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing

“affecting”: “I felt something. Could’ve been the book. Could’ve been my lunch.”

Jennifer Weiner

, journalist and bestselling author of Good in Bed, The Breakaway, The Griffin Sisters’ Greatest Hits, and other novels

“approachable”: the new ‘“accessible” for critics who prefer longer and clunkier words

Jansplaining

67 cringe-worthy clichés of book reviewing

A dishonor roll of the shameless hype used by critics, wittily decoded by their peers and by publishing insiders

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