I realized I’d fallen into the habit of giving a 5 out of 5 sometimes simply because I couldn’t point to any specific negatives in a book. Unfortunately this meant that good-but-not-stunning books occupied the same rating as “it blew my socks off” books, and that seemed unfair to the latter. I’m not about to go back and try to re-assess the ratings of more than a thousand items. So instead, I have a slightly different set of standards for a 5 out of 5 going forward, and it boils down to this:
If your book is exciting and interesting enough, and draws me in enough, to leave me babbling to my book-loving husband about it, then it’ll almost certainly get a 5 out of 5 (maybe a 4.5 if I have one or two minor quibbles with the content).
If I can’t find anything in particular wrong with it but it doesn’t move me enough to want to share my excitement, it’s likely to get a 4 out of 5 or, at most, maybe a 4.5. If I give your book a 4 out of 5, please do not take that as an insult. Not every good book can spin me up that much, if just because writing quality is subjective. A 4 means you’ve written a very good book indeed. But if you get a 5 from here on out, you can be sure that your book completely wowed me.
is a “Spellbound Falls” romance. It seems to be billed as one of those books that’s set in the same world as an author’s previous books, but that’s supposed to stand alone relatively well. Or at least, that’s the impression I got from the cover. Certainly we’re seeing more and more of this lately—we’re getting more series of indeterminate length, often with smaller print runs, meaning that you can’t assume a reader will have read all previous books when they pick up a new one (particularly if you’re hoping to pick up new readers as you go along). At any rate, my impression was definitely wrong. While the story itself sort of stands alone (at least for the first 100 pages, which is what I read before stopping), the world does not. Sure, you can tell there’s some paranormal to the world as you read, but it hits a point where the author is just dumping in mention of weird thing after weird thing, late enough in the game that it feels like an out-of-nowhere genre shift. (Even the back-of-the-book text, if you aren’t familiar with the series, gives no real indication that this is a paranormal romance, other than the “Spellbound Falls” moniker.)
I have several that end in absolutely gorgeous, sparkling Swarovski crystal oval elements in several colors. I have a bunch that end in dangling skeins of “crystal yarn”—yarn that has tiny Swarovski crystals sewn into it. I also have a handful that end in dangles of porcelain and semiprecious beads.
