Becoming Us by Alex Cross
Published 2019 · 72,875 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Romance, LGBTQ+ Fiction
How hard is Becoming Us to read?
Becoming Us scores 26 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: 24 out of 100
- A contemporary romance narrated by Noah in a plain, confessional register. The vocabulary sits near Beach Read and It Ends with Us, with everyday diction suited to a wide readership.
- Sentence structure: 27 out of 100
- Contemporary genre romance generally uses short, direct sentences and accessible phrasing. The shifts between present and past add some demand on tracking tense but not on sentence construction, close to Beach Read.
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- The subject is personal: grief, addiction and recovery between two men. Emotions are rendered through relationship and event, as in It Ends with Us, with little theoretical content.
- Information density: 28 out of 100
- At about 73,000 words, the book is a focused two-person story. A dual-timeline structure adds some backstory to track, but the pace stays comfortable, similar to Beach Read.
- Narrative indirection: 30 out of 100
- First-person narration from Noah and the romance genre favour direct emotional statement. The alternating timelines let readers piece together what happened between the men, but the book mostly tells its story plainly.
- Symbolic density: 20 out of 100
- Genre romance of recovery and redemption relies on the literal events of the relationship over sustained motif. Any symbolism is minimal, in line with Beach Read.
- Ironic distance: 16 out of 100
- Noah's earnest first-person voice engages emotion directly, with the sincerity of It Ends with Us. Little gap separates what the narration says from what it means.
- Resolution withholding: 24 out of 100
- A second-chance romance that centres on recovery and redemption points to an emotionally resolved ending, as in the genre-expected conclusion of Beach Read. As the second half of a duet, it promises closure on the pair's story.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- The narration shifts between present and past within a single point of view. That dual timeline is a modest structural device, more complex than the linear romance of Beach Read but far from experimental.
How Becoming Us is regarded
Becoming Us holds a literary regard score of 90 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.