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Amazon is full of fake reviews for products. So it's not a great surprise that an Amazon-owned entity - Goodreads - would be full of fake reviews too. It is what it is. We'll just have to start applying the standard "fake review filter". Ignore all the five star reviews. Ignore all the one star reviews. Quickly glance over what remains and see if you can find something that sounds like it was written by someone of intelligence and integrity. Not always possible to find one of these good reviews, but the game is to try.
Mostly I just ignore book reviews though. They are too subjective, too dependent on personal tastes and biases, and can be driven by an agenda as much as anything else. A three line plot summary, just to get a basic idea of what the book is about, is more useful to me. Even just keywords - example: "adventure, lost island, dinosaurs" - often do the job better than some would-be expert criticizing the author for incorrectly identifying T-Rex teeth as being 4" long rather than 3" (there are lots of reviews like that).
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