How Slowburn’s Burn Rating Works

A star rating is a verdict. You give it once, at the end, with the whole book behind you, and it flattens four hundred pages into one number. It is useful for other people. It is almost useless for remembering what reading the book was like.

The Burn is the other measurement. It is taken while you read.

The dial

On every book you are inside, Slowburn shows a row of five flames. Tap the one that matches how badly the book has you, right now:

1. Cooling — it’s there, you’re reading it, that’s all.
2. Warm — you’re in. You’d rather keep going than stop.
3. Burning — you are thinking about it when it’s closed.
4. Feral — you are not okay, and you are not stopping.
5. Ruined — do not speak to you.

You can tap it every time you pick the book up, once a night, once a chapter, or only when something changes. There is no schedule and nothing nags you. Each tap is stored with the page you were on, and only on your phone.

The curve

That is the part a star rating cannot do. Because each tap is tied to a page, Slowburn can draw the shape of the book as you read it: the slow build, the chapter where it turned, the peak, the cooling after the ending. Two readers can give a book the same five stars and have completely different curves, and the curves are the truer record.

On the book’s page you see the curve so far, and its peak: peaked at Ruined, page 230. That is the chapter that got you. It is written down now, which means you can find it again.

When you finish

The curve gets a name. Not a score: a shape.

• Slow burn — it took its time with you, and then it didn’t.
• Instant — it had you from the first pages and never let go.
• Wildfire — it went up fast and burned out before the end.
• Flicker — it caught, and lost you, and caught again.
• Steady — the same heat, start to finish. Reliable is not an insult.
• Cooled — it had you, and then it let you go.

The name comes with a line, and both go onto a card you can share. The card carries the curve and the name and the book’s title. It never carries a note, a rating, a spice level, or anything you wrote. What you share is the shape of the reading; what you keep is everything else.

Why it lives with the journal

A book you rated four stars in June is a fact. A book that took you from Cooling to Ruined over five nights in June is a memory. Slowburn keeps both, but it is built around the second one, because that is the one you will want back.

Over time the burns feed the parts of Slowburn that read your journal back to you: your Reading Identity learns how you burn, the Monthly Post-Mortem knows which book ruined you this month, and the shelf itself tints each book’s ribbon by its latest heat, so a glance at the row tells you which one has you.

None of it is a rating. It is closer to a fever chart. Which, for this genre, is the honest instrument.