Kristi Noem has spent the past few weeks fighting a firestorm of criticism about the contents of her new book—the one in which she boasts about murdering her pet dog, Cricket, in a gravel pit, discusses botching the execution of a goat, and dishes details on a dubious meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
So she’ll probably be somewhat relieved that Amazon appears to have imposed a limit on reviews for No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward, which was published Tuesday.
The online retail giant said it had “noticed unusual reviewing activity” on the book and therefore restricted the reviews, which are now completely invisible on the memoir’s page as of Wednesday morning.
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“We want Amazon customers to shop with confidence knowing that the reviews they see are authentic and trustworthy,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement to The Daily Beast. “If we notice unusual reviewing activity, we will occasionally limit reviews to verified purchases only.”
Reports about what was being said before the restriction came into force, however, will be difficult reading for the South Dakota governor.
Goodreads, the Amazon subsidiary where bookworms share their literary recommendations and reviews, has similarly imposed “temporary limitations on submitting ratings and reviews” of Noem’s book. “This may be because we’ve detected unusual behavior that doesn’t follow our review guidelines,” an explanatory note reads when attempting to add a review as of Wednesday morning.
One Amazon review captured by MeidasTouch before the feedback disappeared was titled “Filled with lies, and violence against animals.” “She shot her puppy in the head,” the reviewer grumbled. “Enough said.”
Another one-star review under the heading “My cat loved this book” said: “He says Cricket was asking for it.” Other negative reviews appear to have consisted entirely of poop emojis, while RawStory said one person called the work “grift for VP at its best” and advised shoppers to “save a tree” by not buying the book.
Not that the book appears to have done anything to burnish Noem’s chances for being chosen by Donald Trump to become his running mate. Several GOP sources previously told The Daily Beast that the memoir had not gone down well in Trumpworld, with one putting her chances of winning the veepstakes at “less than zero now.”
For her own part, Noem has remained bullish in increasingly heated interviews when asked about the book, evading giving a straight answer about the veracity of its anecdote about meeting Kim Jong Un (which, according to the book’s publisher, is being removed from new editions of the print edition and scrubbed “as soon as technically possible on the audio and ebook” versions) and insisting that her choice to kill Cricket was illustrative of her willingness to make hard decisions.
Noem’s patience appeared to completely snap during one interview with Fox Business Network host Stuart Varney on Tuesday morning when he asked her if she’d discussed her dog-killing in conversations with Trump.
“Enough, Stuart,” Noem raged. “This interview is ridiculous, what you are doing right now. You need to stop.”
