Things We Never Got Over by Lucy Score
Published 2022 · 496 pages · 150,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Romance
How hard is Things We Never Got Over to read?
Things We Never Got Over scores 17 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
- Casual, accessible vocabulary. Small-town Virginia dialect and bar vocabulary. Nothing demanding.
- Sentence structure: 18 out of 100
- Conversational prose. Long novel but syntactically simple. Written for immersive reading.
- Abstraction: 18 out of 100
- Concrete small-town scenes. Found family and community explored through incident rather than analysis.
- Information density: 20 out of 100
- Long novel but loosely paced. Small-town detail accumulates warmly rather than densely.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Dual POV, linear. The sister's betrayal is the inciting incident, not a sustained mystery.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- Knockemout as found home. The bar as Knox's territory. The twin sister as the foil. The niece as the unexpected family.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Both narrators are sincere. Knox's gruffness is endearing rather than ironic.
- Resolution withholding: 18 out of 100
- The romance resolves fully. The sister subplot provides secondary tension. Satisfying HEA.
- Structural complexity: 15 out of 100
- Dual POV, linear, long but structurally simple. The length is the ambition.
How Things We Never Got Over is regarded
Things We Never Got Over holds a literary regard score of 42 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.