About

An author myself, I started writing reviews as a way of critically evaluating novels so that I could turn that same pitiless eye on my own work. It worked! My writing improved in leaps and bounds, but I was left with a pile of reviews that were just sitting there collecting silicon dust on my hard drive. So I thought why not throw them all together on a website and actually see if anyone else agrees with my dissections; and if I could get some shameless publicity for my own book out of it in the process, then all the better.

I don’t pretend to be a literary genius or some English professor with a mountain of degrees on the thirteen correct uses of a comma. I’m a fantasy and sci-fi fan and now author. I love the genre and when I find a book that really speaks to me, I feel a compulsion to share it with anyone who might be interested. I have fairly severe dyslexia, hence why I listen to books far more than I read them, and this feeds into my preferences. I have a lot of respect for the classics, I truly do, but dragging prose that sound like a regurgitated thesaurus describing characters that are purely either paragons of virtue or dastardly devils just aren’t for me. I like punchy books with a good pace, characters that are just as flawed as us mere mortals, and swearing. By the gods do I love swearing. I just can’t take a story seriously if, when everything is going to hell, all the characters are still minding their language like a pre-school teacher raised by nuns. Real people shit, swear, and squeal, and as such, realistic character should as well.

My Rating System

The first thing you need to know about my reviews is that they are fairly brutal. I rate books out of 5 stars, with 2.5 stars rating as distinctly average, so if I rate a book with 3 stars, that doesn’t mean it’s bad. That score is above average. The scoring system generally falls into the following categories:

1 Star: awful, and I can’t see how anybody could like that story.

2 Stars: Others with different tastes may enjoy it a lot more, but it just wasn’t for me.

3 Stars: Above average. Would consider buying a sequel.

4 Stars: Great book. I loved it and most likely had the next in the series downloaded before even finishing the prior book.

5 Stars: The unicorns. The sorts of books that tick just about every one of my personal likes and artfully dodge the pitfalls that drive me mad. Perfecting personified.    

Next, you should know that I give every book two different scores: Professional and Personal. What this means is that even if I give a book a low Personal score because I didn’t find the content engaging with my own specific preferences, if that book is still objectively good (great prose, clever story, deep characters) I can still give it the rating that it deserves. I don’t believe books should be penalised for my own personal tastes, but I also believe that those who might share the same preferences as I do will find the Personal ratings far more useful for selecting their next audiobook.