About

I am Cal Hewitt, and I am the whole operation. One person, reading and listening, writing it up afterwards. There is no team here, no editorial staff, and nobody else has a say in a score.

Why the two scores

An audiobook is two purchases wearing one cover. The writing is one thing and the performance is another, and a single star rating hides which half you would be paying for. A wonderful book can be read badly. A middling book can be carried by somebody extraordinary at a microphone. Merging those into one number throws away the thing you actually needed to know.

So, the writing gets a score and the narration gets its own, and where I have only read a book the narration score is simply absent rather than guessed.

What the labels on each review mean

Every review says how I consumed the thing, because the claim this site makes is that a real person finished it, and that claim only stays true if the different ways of finishing are kept apart.

• Read means the text, cover to cover. No narration score follows.
• Listened means the audio edition, finished.
• Both means both, and it is the only case where I will tell you outright which one to choose.
• Did not finish means I stopped, and the review says where and why. A book I abandoned is still worth writing about.
• Sampled means an hour or a preview, and it is never called a review.

What I read

Business, money and self-improvement. Thriller, mystery, crime and true crime. Science fiction and fantasy. History, science, biography and memoir. Faith.

Titles get covered because I read them, not because a keyword looked promising. That is the real constraint on this site and it is a deliberate one.

On faith titles

I went to Catholic elementary and middle school, spent a year at a Jesuit university, and considered entering the seminary as an adult. I mention it once, here, because when I review a faith title you should know the lens I am reading through.

It is background, not standing. I will tell you whether a book argues well, whether it is honest about the hard parts, and who it is written for. I will not tell you what to believe, and I do not rule on anybody’s faith.

What I am not

I have no professional credential in literature, publishing, theology or narration. I am not a critic by trade. Nobody sends me advance copies, I have no relationship with any publisher, and if that ever changes for a title it will say so on that title’s own page.

So, you will sometimes be told not to bother. That is the most useful sentence a review can hand you and the hardest one to find anywhere.

Some things this site will not do

• Review anything I have not read or heard.
• Publish an aggregate rating, a review count, or an average of other people’s opinions. The scores here are one person’s and are labelled as such.
• Invent a fact. No made-up awards, quotes, sales figures or narrator credits. Where two sources disagree, the page says so instead of picking the tidier one.
• Let a commission decide a recommendation. The affiliate disclosure is specific about how that could go wrong and what stops it.
• Spoil a book to prove a point. Content guidance names the topic, never the scene.

Elsewhere

I also write on Medium, under the same name. Those pieces are companions to this site rather than copies of it: nothing there carries an affiliate link, and where a post overlaps with a review here it takes a different angle rather than repeating one.

Corrections

Editions get confused and I get things wrong. If something here is wrong, tell me and it gets fixed, and a correction that changes a verdict is noted on the page rather than made quietly.