All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews
Published 2023 · 321 pages · 80,250 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is All This Could Be Different to read?
All This Could Be Different scores 40 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 32 out of 100
- Contemporary American prose with tech and queer vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 35 out of 100
- Clear, direct sentences.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- Questions of precarity, identity, and community.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Milwaukee and immigrant experience efficiently conveyed.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- First-person with gaps for readers.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- Work, love, and stability carry thematic weight.
- Ironic distance: 40 out of 100
- Samra writes with compassion and clear-eyed observation.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- Ending hopeful but precarity continues.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Straightforward first-person narrative.
How All This Could Be Different is regarded
All This Could Be Different holds a literary regard score of 52 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.