The Midwife of Auschwitz (Women of War #1)
Published 2022 · 348 pages · 95,700 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, War Fiction
How hard is The Midwife of Auschwitz (Women of War #1) to read?
The Midwife of Auschwitz (Women of War #1) scores 23 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: 27 out of 100
- A commercial historical novel for a wide readership, it relies on plain contemporary vocabulary. Like Beach Read and It Ends with Us, it favors clarity over ornament, with only light period and medical terms.
- Sentence structure: 27 out of 100
- Sentences in this kind of popular historical fiction run short to medium and move the plot along. The syntax is closer to Beach Read than to anything demanding.
- Abstraction: 28 out of 100
- The book centres on concrete events: a maternity hut, newborns, guards and the daily fight to survive. Its moral questions arise through scenes rather than argument, close to the personal directness of It Ends with Us.
- Information density: 30 out of 100
- Readers call it informative and a page turner, which points to a steady plot with historical detail woven in. It is lighter than The Housemaid-style thrillers in density, with few threads to track.
- Narrative indirection: 22 out of 100
- Accounts describe a straightforward wartime narrative following Ana and Ester. Readers are told what happens and do little inferring, much as in The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
- Symbolic density: 20 out of 100
- The subject matter carries weight, but the book works through literal events in the camp rather than layered motifs. Its symbolism stays minimal, like Beach Read.
- Ironic distance: 14 out of 100
- Earnest historical witness is the mode here, as in The Tattooist of Auschwitz. Nothing in the evidence suggests an ironic gap between what the text says and what it means.
- Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
- Genre expectations for this kind of historical fiction point to a clear emotional resolution of the central story. It likely sits near It Ends with Us in closure, with little deliberate ambiguity.
- Structural complexity: 20 out of 100
- It is the first book of a series and is set in 1943, which suggests a linear, accessible plot following two women. The structure is closer to Beach Read than to any formal experiment.
How The Midwife of Auschwitz (Women of War #1) is regarded
The Midwife of Auschwitz (Women of War #1) holds a literary regard score of 16 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.