Miracles and masterpieces

I've been waiting for someone to say something like this and Joe Queenan now has. He's attending to what he calls 'the least-discussed subject in the world of belles-lettres' - book reviews handing out unmerited praise. Queenan says (and has some fun saying it):

[T]he vast majority of book reviews are favorable, even though the vast majority of books deserve little praise.

I don't know about that, but I have been wondering lately at the number of commendations on the covers of books that have seemed to me totally over the top. I give three examples from novels I've read in the last few months; the first of them I really rated, the second I thought was OK, and the last is a literary failure to rank amongst the most comprehensive. Critics said (in turn):

(1) '[The author] throws down sentences that will leave you amazed.'

(2) 'A novella-sized miracle of passion and war.'

(3) 'This is a small masterpiece.'

Think about how often it is that a sentence leaves you amazed, unless because it is bringing you a piece of startling news or is appallingly constructed. Yet this critic thinks this writer 'throws down' (!) sentences - in the plural - to leave the reader amazed. I loved the book and by some of its sentences I was, just possibly, struck; but I was never amazed. Then, 'miracle of passion and war'. Well, the book in question contains both passion and war and is reasonably absorbing. But it ain't no miracle. What does a novel need to do to be a miracle? I leave the question unanswered, but you would expect such a book to be at least exceptional within some few decades, which this one wasn't. Finally, the small masterpiece is the book I thought a comprehensive failure of a novel. OK, so judgements differ. A masterpiece, however, even if more frequent than a miracle, doesn't come along all that often, and I'll wager that, 20 years since its first publication, there are few people who think of this book as a masterpiece, if indeed they think of it at all.