Read Clean!
Looking for clean, wholesome, family-friendly books? Rated Reads is a book rating resource for those who don’t like excessive vulgar language, violence or explicit sex in their otherwise good books.
Latest Book Reviews
Our Ratings System
Red = High
A HIGH rating (like a movie R) is for books that contain roughly over five or six uses of strong profanity, explicit sexual details ("open-door," or pages devoted to specifics), gory violence, or any other strongly vulgar content; sometimes the books we’ve rated have some harsh themes that alone require at least the moderate or the high rating (we try to explain why and in as much detail as possible without making the review itself unreadable).
Orange = Moderate
In a MODERATE (like PG-13), profanity might include a lot of the "moderate" expletives (like those that start with a, s, b, etc.) and up to five occurrences of the “f” word (referred to usually as “strong language”). Sexual references might include some details at several points throughout the book, but not longer, detailed "open-door" scenes. Violence could be fairly detailed, with some blood and guts or some harshness.
Yellow = mild
MILD (compare to a PG rating) means you may see occurrences of the tamest bad words, like those that start with d or h, plus perhaps a few moderate ones. No strong profanity (“f” word). Sexual references might occur but nothing explicit (think of these as "closed-door" scenes). Violence might be part of the plot, but there won’t be many gory details. Book reviews showing this rating are pretty family-friendly and clean books.
Green = None
NONE means the reviewed book contains no offensive language (or virtually none — maybe one or two uses of mild language), no sexual references, and no violence. These books are family-friendly, wholesome, clean books for all ages. Like G-rated book reviews.
Dirt= Don't invest reading time
There’s also a fifth category into which we rarely assign books: DIRT (Don’t Invest Reading Time). This rating is not reflective of the quality of the writing. It's simply a note that the reviewer chose not to finish the book because it was already clear early on that it would earn a HIGH rating. If you’re using this site to find clean books, you would most likely not want to invest reading time either. With the more recent addition of the "Rapid Rating," the DIRT rating is now even less used.
Meet our founder
CATHY CARMODE LIM
Cathy Carmode Lim has been a book reviewer for 30 years, two of which she was a newspaper book page editor. The mother of four daughters and four grandchildren founded Rated Reads in January 2008 and reviews many of the books. She always has a variety of projects going in addition to running Rated Reads and working as a copy editor and writer (visit her website if you need copy editing for a book manuscript or other project). She lives in Alabama, and she blogs about books and several other topics at LifeandLims.com.
