MacKenzie Bezos, novelist and wife of Jeff Bezos, wanted to like the new book that just came out about her husband. We know this, because she posted a review on Amazon this week under the subject line, "I wanted to like this book."

There followed a one-star review of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, in which, despite her best efforts, Mrs Bezos reported nothing to like and a lot to complain about. The author, Brad Stone, must be jumping for joy.

Most unauthorised biographies don't thrill their subjects. At its best, the biographer's art is still a preposterous cheek, famously likened by Janet Malcolm to that of "the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewellery and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away".

In this case, apart from correcting a small error at the beginning of the book, MacKenzie Bezos limited her objections to the author's habit of imputing her husband's state of mind. "The book," she writes, "passes off speculation about his thoughts and intentions as fact." She then lists some of the offending semantics: "Bezos felt …" "Bezos believed …" "Bezos wanted …" "Bezos fixated …" "Bezos worried …" "Bezos was frustrated …" "Bezos was consumed …" And so on.

MacKenzie Bezos urges readers to remember that the author, a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek, "never interviewed" her husband for the book, and would like it to be noted "how seldom these guesses about his feelings and motives are marked with a footnote indicating there is any other source to substantiate them."

She also questions Brad Stone's use of shading. Why so many negative accounts of life on the Amazon payroll? To redress the balance, Bezos quotes from some thank you notes sent in by staff:

I cried as I read the Career Choice announcement on Amazon today. What Amazon is doing to help its employees is affecting lives in the most meaningful way I can think of. It restores my faith in humanity.

And:

Having finished my shift I thought I would send you a short email to say thank you. There is a fantastic team based here and we have super support. Our mentors are true Amazon angels providing guidance and showing great patience.

The untold story, she says – the story no one wants to write because it is too boring – may be that people at Amazon "really do believe in the mission". Which, while we're on the subject of language choice, has about it the whiff of the North Korean model village that all the new billion-dollar companies have these days.

Nonetheless, as these things go, it's a pretty measured response, which Stone for his part had the good sense to respond graciously to here. Meanwhile, the sense of closed circuit that comes from a book about Amazon being criticised by the Amazon establishment beneath its sale page on Amazon is either an amazing testament to free-market liberties or a sign of the approaching apocalypse. I can't tell.

But in any case, one takes it with a pinch. The suspicious among you will read the review and compare it to the other two Amazon reviews posted by the same author in the last 15 years – both of novels; both carrying five stars. Neither sounds much like this review, which, with the kind of presumption to infuriate Mrs Bezos, one imagines she ran past her husband before posting and might more accurately have borne a joint byline. But perhaps this is unduly cynical.

MacKenzie Bezos could have been meaner. She could have done a Wendi Deng and jumped the guy's head. Maybe, her tone was tempered by the fact that Bezos is herself no stranger to the bearpit of Amazon reviews. Her own novel, Traps, published in March this year, was, like the Stone book, mostly well reviewed, with a single hatchet. ("This book makes Fifty Shades of Gray seem like To The Lighthouse. Do yourself a favor and watch television instead.")

So she knows what it feels like. And either way, she wins. If the book goes to No 1 thanks to her critique, she and Mr Bezos have merely drawn more trade to the mothership.

While it's touching to see a spouse spring to her beloved's defense, there are limits to loyalty. As literary agent Andrew Wylie pointed out in a recent interview with the New Republic, the online retailer's publishing arm has its drawbacks. (The whole interview is worth revisiting for Wylie's extraordinary frankness about how much he hates Amazon: to wit, in answer to the question "what would it take to get you to sell a book to Amazon?" the agent replies, "If one of my children were kidnapped and they were threatening to throw a child off a bridge and I believed them, I might.")

Amazon may be staffed by angels, but when it comes to her own books, MacKenzie Bezos is published by Knopf.