Choosing a Book's Reading Age
Because we intend our reviews to be unopinionated, the reading age is less important for us to get right than the actual content insight of the story. The idea behind this is that parents, teachers, librarians etc. will be able to make their own decision on the best reading age based on the story's content. See more about our review philosophy here.
However, we do provide a Reading Age in our reviews. These are the categories that we provide for the Reading Age:
- Picture Books (0-3 yrs)
- Picture Book (2-5 yrs)
- Picture Book (3-6 yrs)
- Picture Book (4-7 yrs)
- Early Readers (5-8 yrs)
- Junior Chapter (7-11 yrs)
- Junior Non-Fiction
- Middle Fiction (9-13 yrs)
- Junior High (age 12-15 yrs)
- Senior High (age 16+)
- Secondary Non-Fiction
- Graphic Novels
- New Adult
- Adult
As you can see, there is quite a lot of overlap between each of the categories. This is necessary because there can be such a difference in the reading ability of two kids that are the same age, even though both might be at the "right" reading level. Generally, we make the final call on the category by looking at the length of the book, the number of chapters (if applicable), the difficulty of the vocabulary, the font size, the white space on the pages, and the content of the story.
We are hoping this is helpful and as always are happy to take on feedback.
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