The Light We Lost by Jill Santopolo
Published 2017 · 368 pages · 70,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Romance
How hard is The Light We Lost to read?
The Light We Lost scores 18 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. 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: 18 out of 100
- Simple, direct vocabulary. Emotional register.
- Sentence structure: 22 out of 100
- Abstraction: 20 out of 100
- Concrete emotional and domestic scenes.
- Information density: 30 out of 100
- Moderate. Thirteen years compressed into a slim novel.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Chronological with the second-person address as framing device.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- September 11 as origin point. Light and loss as recurring images.
- Ironic distance: 100 out of 100
- Emotionally raw. No ironic distance.
- Resolution withholding: 22 out of 100
- The ending recontextualizes the entire narrative.
- Structural complexity: 18 out of 100
- Chronological second-person narration. Clean structure.
How The Light We Lost is regarded
The Light We Lost holds a literary regard score of 23 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.