The most important thing to remember when reading our reviews is that these are just our opinions. Even we don’t always agree on how to rate a book. Are the characters well thought out and three dimensional? Is the pacing of the plot appropriate without filler? Are we bored while we read or do we stay up until 5am because we just can’t put it down? These are the kinds of questions we ask ourselves when we prepare our reviews. At the end of the day however, what we really look for is the feeling that a good book gives us.

This means that we could love a book that holds very little literary value, and hate one that is written in beautiful, flowy prose. A low rating does not mean that the book is bad, just that we did not necessarily connect with it.

A low rating does not necessarily equal a bad book.

Star system

: Official new favourite. Everything from the storyline to the characters to the plot was perfect. These are the ones we will reach for again and again.

: This book was phenomenal! A lot of the elements in it worked really well together, and we will definitely look into other work by this author.

: It was a good book, but nothing extraordinary. The characters were most likely okay, but we didn’t really connect with certain aspects, be they plot or character based. Overall, we enjoy books over 3 stars, but find it difficult to give them more than that.

: We did not really like it. For 2 star books, there is something that keeps us reading (perhaps a good secondary character or we just need to know how it ends), but we don’t connect with the big ideas of the novel and did not enjoy reading it.

: It is very, very rare that we will use this rating. If a book only gets 1 star, there were serious plot issues, we found it uninteresting and seriously considered stopping the book many times.

We also have a half star system and we tend to abuse it a lot, but it basically means it’s somewhere between our outlines above.

Should you have any questions, feel free to send them our way! (dreamteamreads@gmail.com)