Spoiler: it means the marketing team ran out of other adjectives. A forensic analysis.
We pulled every back-cover blurb from this season’s episodes and counted the word “unputdownable.” It appeared on four out of six books. Two of those four we handed a Case Dismissed verdict. Statistically, the word tells you nothing.
Mom’s rule of thumb: the more urgently a blurb insists you won’t be able to stop reading, the more likely there’s a saggy middle third it’s trying to distract you from. Daughter is slightly more forgiving, but agrees that “unputdownable” has officially joined “tour de force” in the pile of blurb words that have stopped meaning anything.
Our replacement metric going forward: does the verdict hold up when we actually read the book. Radical, we know.
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