Close to You by Nissa Renzo
140,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Young Adult Romance, Contemporary Romance, Coming-of-Age Fiction
How hard is Close to You to read?
Close to You scores 33 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: 27 out of 100
- Renzo writes in plain, contemporary YA/NA prose with no specialized terminology or archaic diction, closer to Beach Read's accessible register than to anything demanding a glossary. Reviewers specifically praise how well the book captures a child's naive interior voice, which keeps the vocabulary simple even in emotionally heavy scenes.
- Sentence structure: 25 out of 100
- Sentences run short to medium and declarative, built for emotional pace rather than syntactic display, in line with genre norms for commercial YA romance. There is no nesting, inversion, or Jamesian subordination slowing the reader down.
- Abstraction: 33 out of 100
- The book stays anchored in concrete scenes (a fire station, a foster home, swim practice) even while processing trauma, so abstraction stays moderate rather than philosophical. Milow's muteness pushes some interiority into reflection on voice and selfhood, nudging this a notch above pure plot-only fiction.
- Information density: 32 out of 100
- This is a single-relationship, dual-POV story without subplots demanding heavy tracking, though a multi-year time span (childhood through the teen years) and a household of other foster kids add some bookkeeping. It reads denser than a single-sitting romance but well short of a multi-plot epic.
- Narrative indirection: 30 out of 100
- Milow and Ashby's alternating chapters state feelings directly rather than requiring readers to read against an unreliable narrator. The dual-POV structure adds a small layer of inference, comparing what each of them notices and withholds from the other, but nothing like Gatsby-level narrator bias.
- Symbolic density: 42 out of 100
- Silence is the book's organizing symbol: Milow's muteness literalizes a trauma most romance heroines only describe, and the opening line, 'I think some people are worth standing in the storm for,' sets up storm-as-loyalty imagery that reviewers note recurs through the book. That is more sustained motif work than a typical genre romance, though nowhere near allegory-level density.
- Ironic distance: 20 out of 100
- The book plays every emotional beat straight. Earnestness, not irony, is the mode reviewers describe, with readers reporting being moved to tears rather than invited to read against the text. There is no gap between what the narration says and what Renzo means.
- Resolution withholding: 42 out of 100
- Reader reviews flag this directly: several subplots, including a supporting character's undisclosed illness, are left open at the end, and some readers wanted more explained. As book one of the Through the Years series, Close to You resolves the central Milow/Ashby relationship but withholds resolution on its secondary threads by design.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- The novel alternates Milow's and Ashby's points of view across a timeline spanning their childhood into their teenage years, which asks more of a reader than a single-POV, single-timeframe romance. It is still fundamentally linear and chronological, not fragmented or nonlinear like a literary-fiction structural experiment.
How Close to You is regarded
Close to You holds a literary regard score of 100 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.