Kirkus Reviews is a magazine, though few readers of its work have ever seen a copy. Like the Michelin guides, it’s known for verdicts spread across the publishing world, bringing good books to first attention and helping to sweep aside huge piles of dross. A Kirkus review is short—fewer than four hundred words—and written to a form. There’s a one-line précis to start. There’s a paragraph of plot and character summary, culminating in formal assessment. And there’s a quotable verdict of one line or one word (“Stunning”). Kirkus’s main virtue is its comprehensiveness: it gets through hundreds of titles even in a slow month. To people who stock shelves, it can be orienting, and, for publishers, it is a geyser of back-cover praise. Kirkus gets its authority from its scale, yet readers generally encounter its reviews individually, book by book.
Kirkus has been getting reviews of its own recently, after deciding to remove a star—its marker for exceptional books—from a young-adult title and revising the accompanying review. At first, it praised “American Heart,” by Laura Moriarty. The novel, to be published this winter, is about a fifteen-year-old white girl from Missouri who supports Muslim-detainment camps until she meets a Muslim woman whom she helps escape to Canada. (The novel is said to echo “Huckleberry Finn.”) Kirkus took down the review, and its editor-in-chief, Claiborne Smith, responded to public concern that “American Heart” was a “white savior” narrative: a story about a person of color who relies on the compassion of a white protagonist for rescue.
The book’s female Muslim reviewer, he wrote, was “well-versed in the dangers of white savior narratives.” Even so, he seemed to override her first assessment. In interviews with Kat Rosenfield, of Vulture, and with NPR, Smith acknowledged that Kirkus removed the star after noticing the book’s white point of view. A new, charier review of “American Heart,” meanwhile, replaced the original, noting that the white heroine’s “ignorance is an effective worldbuilding device, but it is problematic that Sadaf”—the Muslim woman—“is seen only through the white protagonist’s filter.”
Kirkus says that the reviewer merely updated her assessment in a way that was “listening” to public complaint. Yet the controversy rattles on, especially because the emendation touches on a broader change, from late 2015, in how the magazine writes about children’s and young-adult fiction. Reviews now explicitly note major characters’ skin colors. Reviewers of books for young readers are given special training to help “identify problematic tropes and representations,” and the reviews themselves are assigned to what Kirkus calls “own voices” reviewers—that is, writers who share an affinity of “lived experience” with characters in the book.
To understand why Kirkus’s decision to revise its review of “American Heart” is insidious, it is helpful to look first at what the magazine has done right. There is nothing unacceptable about removing a book’s star, for the same reason that there is nothing unacceptable about adding one: editors who bestow a distinction of their own invention are entirely entitled to take it away. There is also nothing wrong with trying to balance point-of-view biases in writing and reviewing. In fact, there is a lot to like. The Kirkus editor responsible for instituting these policies, Vicky Smith, has written about her rationale, which appears sane and well-considered.
“Over and over, I’ve heard from parents, librarians, teachers, and kids themselves that it would be wonderful to read books about black kids, or Indian kids, or Native American kids who are just being kids instead of being oppressed in some way,” Smith explained. If you start noting ethnicity to make those books recognizable, she pointed out, you really ought to report whiteness, too. Smith conceded that all of this gratuitous description can read strangely, and anyone who makes a survey of Kirkus’s young-adult reviews will agree. “The torment that has followed the young white woman since freshman year disappears,” one review reads. Another: “Lyra, Gemma, and Pete are white, Caelum has dark skin, and a number of important minor characters are described as having dark, black, or brown skin.” O.K., well, thanks. Still, the laborious specificity seems a fair price for a chance to nudge American fiction toward a state that better reflects American society. Some awkwardness and growing pains are inevitable in a moment of change.
That is not what’s going on with the “American Heart” review. Circumstances conducive to contemporary enlightenment were in place from the start: an observant Muslim woman, presumably given Kirkus’s sensitivity training, was assigned a review about a book featuring a female Muslim character; the protagonists’ races and relationships were adequately described. The reviewer published her assessment. Then, moved to reconsider either by her editorial superiors or by public response (or both), she allowed Kirkus to publish an update to her judgment.
In doing so, Kirkus, one of the country’s most prolific book reviews, has somehow managed to misapprehend both the nature of reviewing and the nature of books. As I’ve written in this magazine, criticism exists in different flavors, but its defining feature is an individualism of response. That response can be wise or unwise, popular or unpopular. A reviewer can squander authority by seeming too often at odds with good judgment. But, without critical autonomy, the enterprise falls apart. The only reason to hire a critic, instead of giving a megaphone to the crowd, is that creative work—books most of all—isn’t processed as a collective. People make sense of art as individuals, and their experiences of the work differ individually, too. A reviewer speaks for somebody, even if he or she doesn’t speak for you.
To assume otherwise risks the worst kind of generalization. I went to high school in San Francisco at the height of the multiculturalism movement. My freshman curriculum did not include “The Catcher in the Rye,” “The Great Gatsby,” or “Moby-Dick.” We read, instead, “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and “Bless Me, Ultima,” and other books showing the range of American fiction. I’m glad. (One can read “The Grapes of Wrath” anytime.) I remember finding Hurston’s novel brilliant and Anaya’s novel boring. I did not conclude, from these feelings, that African-American literature was interesting and Chicano literature was not. Why would I? The joy of books is the joy of people: they’re individuals, with a balance of virtues and flaws. We are free to find—and learn our way into—the ones that we enjoy the most, wherever they come from.
That specificity of response is what Vicky Smith seems to encourage by opening the full canon of new work to new readers. It’s also, though, the diversity that Kirkus has smothered by issuing a “correction”—the editor’s word—on the political emphasis of a published response. Although it’s easy these days to forget, a politics is a practice of problem-solving, case by case, not a unilateral set of color-coded rules. If certain inputs guarantee certain outputs, what’s in play isn’t politics but doctrine. Kirkus, admirably, is trying to be on the progressive side of a moment of transition in our reading. But its recent choices aren’t about progress, or about helping young people find their way through many voices. They’re about reducing books to concepts—and subjecting individuals who read them to the judgments of a crowd.
