A Strange and Stubborn Endurance by Foz Meadows
Published 2022 · 544 pages · 149,600 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Fantasy, Romance, LGBTQ+ Fiction
How hard is A Strange and Stubborn Endurance to read?
A Strange and Stubborn Endurance scores 33 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. 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: 40 out of 100
- A Tor fantasy romance described as lush, with court-politics terminology and invented setting terms. The register is closer to Beach Read than to Gravity's Rainbow, with some worldbuilding vocabulary to absorb.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Commercial fantasy prose written for broad adult readers. Sentences likely run longer than in a plain contemporary romance but stay clear and readable, nearer to The Remains of the Day in difficulty than to Jamesian syntax.
- Abstraction: 33 out of 100
- The story rests on concrete events: an arranged marriage, a murder, court maneuvering. Emotional themes of recovery and self-acceptance add some interior depth, though the book stays closer to It Ends with Us than to philosophical fiction.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Byzantine-style politics, a murder mystery and a developing romance across about 150,000 words ask the reader to track factions and intrigue. Reviewers call the pacing stodgy in places, which points to a slower flow of new information.
- Narrative indirection: 35 out of 100
- Mystery and court intrigue require some inference about motives, but the romance and emotional arcs are told plainly. Reviewers describe an accessible genre narrative, in the territory of The Housemaid's reveals.
- Symbolic density: 28 out of 100
- Genre romance-fantasy centered on healing and belonging, with no evidence of heavy allegory or dense motif systems. Its symbolism stays minimal, like Beach Read's.
- Ironic distance: 25 out of 100
- Reviews describe a tender, earnest romance. Court politics bring some scheming and double meanings, but the narration stays sincere about its characters' pain and growth.
- Resolution withholding: 30 out of 100
- A series opener built on a romance arc with a mystery plot. Readers describe a satisfying move to a happy marriage, so the central relationship resolves, with only series threads left open.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- A linear romance-mystery with court intrigue and, presumably, two viewpoints. Nothing suggests timeline experiments or formal play, so it sits near Beach Read's linear structure with modest plot threading.
How A Strange and Stubborn Endurance is regarded
A Strange and Stubborn Endurance holds a literary regard score of 28 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.