The Book of Love by Kelly Link
Published 2024 · 195,000 words · about 13 hours at an average pace · Fantasy, Contemporary Fantasy, Literary Fiction, Coming-of-Age
How hard is The Book of Love to read?
The Book of Love scores 53 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. 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: 42 out of 100
- Link writes in clear, contemporary American English — literary but not showcase-y, closer to the accessible lyricism of The Great Gatsby than to Nabokov's ornamentation or Melville's specialized diction. Reviewers repeatedly praise the prose as unshowy and readable despite the book's length.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Sentences are mostly clean and contemporary, built for narrative momentum across five points of view rather than syntactic display. Occasional longer, lyrical passages appear around the mythic material, but nothing approaches Jamesian nesting or Faulknerian run-ons.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- The novel stays grounded in concrete teenage life — bake sales, band practice, a dead sister's bedroom — even as it layers in myth. Ideas about love, fate, and identity emerge through scene and character rather than essayistic digression.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- At over 600 pages with five point-of-view characters, a town's worth of secondary cast, and an evolving mythology involving Anabin, Bogomil, and Malo Mogge, the book asks readers to track a lot of moving parts, though reviewers describe the pace as unhurried and digressive rather than tightly packed.
- Narrative indirection: 52 out of 100
- The four resurrected characters don't remember what happened to them during their year away, and the novel withholds the mechanics of Anabin and Bogomil's arrangement for long stretches, forcing readers to piece together the rules of the contest alongside the characters.
- Symbolic density: 66 out of 100
- The book runs on fairy-tale logic — a rock-star poster that becomes a person, a title that names an actual (or metaphorical) book governing love's rules, a goddess who embodies fairy tales' old cruelty — layering myth over a very ordinary Massachusetts town.
- Ironic distance: 38 out of 100
- Despite its fantastical scaffolding, the novel is emotionally sincere rather than satirical — reviewers describe it as heartfelt and earnest about grief, sibling rivalry, and first love, with the humor coming from character voice rather than authorial distance from its subjects.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- The rules of the Anabin/Bogomil contest and the exact stakes for who has to 'go back down' stay deliberately hazy for much of the book, a vagueness some reviewers flagged as frustrating; the fairy-tale material resists the kind of tidy, fully-explained magic system genre readers might expect.
- Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
- The novel splits its point of view across at least five characters — Laura, Susannah, Daniel, Mo, and Bowie — interleaving their present-day investigation with the buried year they can't remember, a maximalist structure closer to Midnight's Children's multi-thread sprawl than a single-narrator ghost story.
How The Book of Love is regarded
The Book of Love holds a literary regard score of 51 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.