Love and Other Words by Christina Lauren
Published 2018 · 441 pages · 46,574 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Romance
How hard is Love and Other Words to read?
Love and Other Words scores 24 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: 22 out of 100
- The vocabulary-word game introduces unusual words—hiraeth, saudade—that become thematic. Medical terminology from Macy's residency.
- Sentence structure: 20 out of 100
- Clean, emotional prose. The dual timeline shifts register between youthful innocence and adult restraint.
- Abstraction: 22 out of 100
- Language and its failures explored through the vocabulary game and the unspoken. More thematic than typical romance.
- Information density: 22 out of 100
- Dual timeline packs two love stories into one novel. Efficient and emotionally concentrated.
- Narrative indirection: 28 out of 100
- The central incident is withheld across the entire novel. Dual timeline creates a sustained mystery structure.
- Symbolic density: 28 out of 100
- The closet as private world. Vocabulary words as love language. The unspoken word as the one that matters most.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Emotionally sincere narration. Macy's restraint reads as grief, not irony.
- Resolution withholding: 32 out of 100
- The New Year's Eve incident withheld until the climax. The dual timeline sustains the mystery effectively.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Alternating past/present timelines. The structural puzzle drives reader engagement.
How Love and Other Words is regarded
Love and Other Words holds a literary regard score of 46 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.