About

No. We are not affiliated with any other groups. We do not take direction from any other groups. We do not answer to any other groups. However, we do communicate with other individuals and groups with whom there is an intersection of mission and values. We are focused on gathering and making information available to anyone who can make use of it, including individual parents or the groups representing their interests. We commonly allow these entities to use our work and accept suggestions for books to look at.

Our reviews may directly cite a large volume of offending content, depending on the work. To support the classification of our work as "fair use" we only include the minimum necessary from the original copyrighted work to show justification for our rating. This includes all the pertinent citations, a brief description of the story and the offending content, and any mitigating factors that would lead to a lower rating. If parents or groups want a detailed preview, description, or synopsis of the story, they can readily find that from other sources on the internet. In fact, we encourage any parents referencing our reports or ratings to also reserarch any reviews, synopses, or discussions found elsewhere to ensure they get a broader picture.

TLDR: We are doing our best to remain within "fair use." Rest assured, we do read the books we review in their entirety and factor the work as a whole into our rating.

We are not determining if a work, as a whole, is obscene, per the legal definition. Our rating system gives a recommendation for the level of parental guidance or action based on the work as a whole. While it is our opinion that many works we rate as "No Minors" (4) or "Aberrant Content" (5) could be considered obscene by most standards, that is not what we are determining.

Some astute critics have opined on the fact our definition for "obscene" mirrors the definition from the Miller test but leaves out the wording "taken as a whole." This is because we are only applying the word "obscene" to express our opinion regarding instances contained within the work (evaluated in context), not the work as a whole. For example, an exceptionally graphic scene of sexual assault is something we may decribe as "obscene," yet we make no statement about whether the work as a whole is obscene. The use of quotations normally indicates we are referencing our definition and application of "obscene." Again, our rating system is not evaluating obscenity (in the legal sense) for the overall work. This should not be misunderstood to construe that we do not evaluate the work as a whole when we assign a rating- we most assuredly do.

TLDR: Similar to how one would perform a Miller test, when assigning a rating we evaluate all "obscene" instances in context and take the work as a whole. We don't make a determination of the legal obscenity status of the work as a whole. We do make a determination of where the work as a whole (with everything evaluated in context) lands in our rating scale. We also offer our opinion that anything with a 4 or 5 on our scale could be determined to be considered obscene by most community standards.

Every book currently reviewed has been located in a school library. Many have been located in our local Brevard County, FL schools, but others have been located across the country by other concerned parents and groups. For many books on our list, that should raise some serious questions. This has been a motivating factor in why we do what we do. Parents need to know what's in the content their children consume.

We do not support "banning" books. First and foremost, our mission is to inform parents on what is in these books being made available to children in schools. Parents can use this information to provide the proper guidance to children reading any of these books. Parents can also use this information to individually, or through groups representing their interests, engage with school boards to determine what works should be made available to their children while under the custodial care of their schools and how (e.g. opt-in or opt-out programs). We fully support both of these use cases, though we are not directly engaged in the latter. Any books that may be excluded from school libraries should still be available in public libraries or in stores for interested students to procure with parental consent.

A work can have several ISBNs depending on the binding of the book or edits made to the work. The ISBN for the version we read is recorded under the author's name on our book reports.

We're working on it, we promise!