We Were the Lucky Ones
Published 2017 · 113,850 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, War Fiction
How hard is We Were the Lucky Ones to read?
We Were the Lucky Ones scores 27 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
- Hunter writes in plain contemporary prose, close to Beach Read and It Ends with Us in accessibility. Period and Polish terms appear but are easy to follow.
- Sentence structure: 27 out of 100
- Sentences are short to medium and direct, with no nesting or stylistic experiments. It reads more simply than The Great Gatsby.
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- The book stays with concrete events: escapes, arrests, hiding, and travel. Ideas about survival and loss arise through the family's actions.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- A large cast and several storylines across countries and years require some tracking, with the historical backdrop supplying context. The pace remains comfortable and plot-driven.
- Narrative indirection: 22 out of 100
- Events and feelings are stated openly in close third person. Readers need little inference.
- Symbolic density: 20 out of 100
- Objects such as the seder table and music carry some weight, but the book works mostly through literal events, closer to The Diary of a Young Girl than to Gatsby.
- Ironic distance: 22 out of 100
- The tone is earnest historical witness, comparable to The Tattooist of Auschwitz. The title's 'lucky' carries mild irony.
- Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
- The book follows each sibling to the war's end and a few years beyond, giving emotional closure. Grief over losses remains, but the plot resolves.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Chapters rotate among siblings, dated and located by heading, across 1939 to the postwar years. The structure is linear within each thread and easy to follow.
How We Were the Lucky Ones is regarded
We Were the Lucky Ones holds a literary regard score of 30 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.