Review Policy / Rating System

I am open to reading books of just about any genre if you are interested in having me review your book. However, I reserve the right to turn down review requests if the book does not appeal to my interests, and I cannot guarantee that I will finish or review a book if it is given to me.

Due to my current extreme backlog of reviews to complete, I fully reserve the right to not respond to a review request if I am uninterested.

If I begin reading your book and I have purchased, borrowed, or otherwise acquired it on my own, I intend to complete and review it. If you wish to provide me with a copy of your book, or with electronic access to the book, so that I might review it, please note that I do prefer physical copies over e-books but of course understand that this is not always possible and will accept your book in any format available if I decide to accept a review request. If I complete a requested review, I promise to be thorough and honest, and I am also okay with being contacted if you wish to discuss the review further.

I am going to follow a 5-star rating system, a simple and popular rating format as seen on Goodreads. Over my years on that site, I’ve noticed that I often tend to rate somewhat higher than my friends and other reviewers (though not always).

Here’s my individual thought process when I am assigning stars:

5 stars: I loved this book 🙂 Importantly, a book doesn’t necessarily need to have outstanding writing to get 5 stars from me if the story is compelling enough for me. I think that’s where I diverge from many other readers. I don’t even do it on purpose, but most of the time I definitely rate based on how much I personally enjoyed my reading experience, rather than how objectively talented the author is, if that makes sense.

4 stars: I liked this book a lot, but either there was one particular element that I didn’t enjoy as much, or the book in its entirety was good with nothing to complain about, but not amazing enough to merit 5 stars.

3 stars: I actually didn’t enjoy this book that much, but it wasn’t terrible. Goodreads says to rate 3 stars when you “liked” a book, but for me I will give a 3 where other readers might give a 2, for “it was OK.” I might have found the story boring even though the writing was good, hated the characters even though the plot was compelling, or even loved the plot and characters despite bad writing. In one way or another, the book was imperfect for me, but I did not hate it.

2 stars: As a whole, most of the book leaned toward bad for me, but there was still at least one positive element that kept me going, or it just wasn’t quite bad enough to get 1 star.

1 star: I hated this book and the only reason I finished it was to tell you just how much I hated it. I almost never assign 1 star to a book because I read for pleasure and can almost always find something to enjoy unless a book is truly, truly terrible for me. I need to be better about giving honest book ratings and using the lower star ratings more often; a lot of times I don’t want to give less than three stars, since I know how hard authors work and I have tried and failed to write my own book several times now.