Pucking Around

Emily Rath’s Pucking Around achieved popularity by becoming a viral hit on BookTok, a subset of social media platform TikTok wherein creators make short videos discussing, recommending, analyzing, or joking about books. While genres discussed on BookTok vary greatly, many romance, Young Adult literature, and fantasy (especially Young Adult fantasy) titles have gained rapid popularity through this social media phenomenon. The capacity of BookTok to launch certain books into overnight prominence has led publishers to take notice. BookTok receives both praise and criticism as a tool for sharing literature and impacting publishing.

Despite this, a number of common criticisms of BookTok have arisen. The chief objection is that the format of the platform is too shallow to allow for deep analysis or contextualization of books, and that it instead reduces novels to “soundbites” or only focuses on commonly used tropes. Another common complaint concerns the ubiquity of certain titles, though Leigh Stein, who penned a defense of BookTok on Literary Hub, frames this criticism as endemic to those who are unfamiliar with the different sub-communities within BookTok (Stein, Leigh. “Booktok Is Good, Actually: On the Undersung Joys of a Vast and Multifarious Platform.” Literary Hub, 28 Apr.