About

Hello and welcome to my blog!

Thank you for checking out my site. I just started blogging in August 2019, so I hope to add more pages to the site as I figure things out, have more time and more to say. I appreciate everyone who stops by.

I am starting a blog because I have been a member of Goodreads since 2017 and I have been reading more than a book a day since 2018 and reviewing all the books I read for more than a year now. I thought I would like to see if I could share my reviews with a larger audience this way. 

What will you see on my blog? What genres of books do I read?

  • Romance mainly, the following sub-genres:
    • Erotic romance 
    • Dark romance (including some BDSM which isn’t always dark)
    • Contemporary romance 
    • Paranormal romance 
    • New Adult romance
    • Young Adult romance 
  • Fantasty (including fairytales and retellings)
  • Sci-fi (Like Ready Player One, Sanctuary and Containment)
  • Some Popular fiction and Nonfiction 

I see my reviews getting better all the time. Though, I may eventually post some of my old reviews of books I really liked, May re-read or if I do later books in the series. I try not to put in spoilers outside of what is already in the blurb, plus a bit more from early on in the books so the reader can get a decent synopsis of the story. I put in my opinions about the writers and the characters, but also since I read so much (over 420 books a year), I tend to forget what a book was about if I read it a few months ago, unless it was truly original or spectacular. So if a second book comes out in that series, I like to go back to my review and be able to jog my memory rather than having to read the entire book over again. Though like I said, I try my best not to put too much details or spoilers in them, so I sometimes have to re-read the book. 

Regarding my ratings. I really look into the books I choose to read. I look at the blurbs and only choose books that sound really good to me. I also look at other reviews, not completely to influence me, but to see if I will like the story or not if I can’t tell from the blurb. Though if a lot of people give a book low ratings, I probably will not read it even if it sounds good. So I find that I genuinely like most of the books I read and rarely give any 1 or 2 star reviews. Also I almost never DNF a book.

I stick with a 5 star rating system because I most sites have that (Goodreads, Amazon, BookBub, and some ARC sites). However, I think I must clarify that I rate each book within its own Genre and Sub-Genre. What I mean by that is that I may give five stars to a 100 Page short read erotic romance, and 5 stars to an Epic Sci-Fi Fantasy novel but those don’t really compare against each other. Each book is excellent, but for the genre and sub-genre that they are in.

So here are my ratings:

  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ = Awesome, I loved it, would read it again.
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ = Great book. I really liked it.
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️ = Good Story. I enjoyed it.
  • ⭐️⭐️ = I didn’t like it. Maybe the story or the writing.
  • ⭐️ = Bad story and not well written.

I do welcome any criticism of my reviews and/or reviewing style. I haven’t yet started posting them, but hopefully they will have a date of when I originally wrote them so you will know if they are older and you can forgive those. One way to tell is my older reviews were much shorter and without images or gifs. 

33 comments

  1. I like your rating as to how a book fits into a genre. I rate my books on basic things like plot, dialog, erotic content, etc. I also try not to judge the characters in the story too much- even if it’s too way out – since it’s fiction after all.
    I wish I could read as much as you do. Well done!

    Liked by 2 people

  2. Hey! Love your reviews. Just found you actually! I have a few books that I think might be in your wheelhouse and would like to submit them for possible reviews! The Mythos series is a BDSM erotic romance take on fairy tales. And Fallen series is a paranormal romance series (with the first book coming out on the 15th!). Let me know how I can submit them, if you’re interested! Thanks!!

    Liked by 1 person

  3. Hey! Love your reviews!! Do you remember reading a new adult romance where a girl stabs her boyfriend’s father with a fork or knife in the hand? I’ve checked every bully romance and can’t remember it.

    Liked by 1 person

  4. Hi, thanks for liking my post “Digging into My Roots.” I’d like to know if you’re interested in reviewing my book, Viking Voyager: An Icelandic Memoir. It’s about my growing up in Iceland and getting the inspiration to travel the world like my Viking forefathers.
    It recently won a prize from the Wishing Shelf Book Awards run by a group of UK authors.
    Here’s the link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MDMRM66
    I can gift you a Kindle book if you’re interested. Thanks much.
    Sverrir Sigurdsson

    Liked by 1 person

    • Thank you so much for thinking of me. Though I mostly read romance books, I do stray outside that genre every so often.

      However, I promised myself I wouldn’t sign up for any new ARCs or read requests this year. I am trying to read books and listen to audiobooks from my TBR that I purchased and have been sitting idle. I have a few favorite authors where I am on their ARC teams, so I still get some ARCs but I am trying to cut down on them more and more. At least until I make a bigger dent in my TBR.

      Like

  5. I have a question and I super hope it’s ok to ask.
    I have been plowing through the Ruby Dixon megaverse and always see your reviews when I go to review mine and saw your blog posted and came to check it out.
    I don’t read as much as you and I’m still new to reading. Read 250 books last year and 160 so far this year and started reading about Jan last year.
    I also love reading and have a bad back and mostly listen to audiobooks and I saw we had that in common and it makes me happy that I’m not alone.
    Anyway-I’m a SAHM and my hubby got laid off a few months ago and I’ve been curious if there is still money in blogging.
    Since you read and review so much and link to your blog from Goodreads etc I’m curious if you can make an income doing this. You don’t have to answer but I don’t have anyone else I can ask and I feel like aside from reviewing the many books I read I don’t know if I have many other skills I could offer right now.
    anyway-it’s always fun to see your reviews pretty much at the top everytime I go to review. I’m getting ready to start the last Icehome book (can’t believe it’s the last!) then reading Ice Planet Clones and then I’ll be done with that series. I will read her Firebood next and then maybe the aspect and anchor.
    Thanks

    Like

    • Thanks so much for your comments and I am glad you like my blog. I don’t really know if there is any way to make money at it. I don’t make any money. I mostly do it for my own enjoyment and because I do read so much, I like to have my reviews on the books I read so I can more easily remember them if I go back to the series or to the book again. I just don’t have enough followers to garner the attention that would be needed to make money, even though I post in multiple places.

      I can say, that I used to post all my reviews on Amazon, and after I had a bunch of reviews (well over 1000), I was chosen to participate in the Vine Voice program where I got a bunch of free items and had to review them on Amazon. I really liked the program and got a lot of free clothes, beauty products, and household items. But Amazon at one point said they didn’t like some of my reviews, and now I can no longer review on Amazon. The thing I hated about that was they never told me which reviews they had problems with and what I did wrong. Though I am sure it was romance books, even though I was always careful to use words like steamy instead of sexy, I would say there were intimate scenes instead of sex scenes and things like that. So who knows what they objected to. It really upset me, but they never changed their decision. I have heard this happened to quite a few reviewers, I have read entire chats about people it happened to. I guess Amazon uses some algorithm for that kind of thing so it probably flags some things as inappropriate when they aren’t.

      Like

Leave a reply to Monika R. Martyn Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.