Tough Guy by Rachel Reid
Published 2020 · 83,600 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Romance, LGBTQ+ Fiction
How hard is Tough Guy to read?
Tough Guy scores 21 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: 26 out of 100
- Contemporary romance written in plain, clear prose, with hockey and club-scene terms that general readers pick up easily. It sits close to Beach Read in vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Sentences are short and conversational, as in most contemporary genre romance. The syntax is comparable to Beach Read's accessible structure.
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- The story rests on concrete situations: a trade, a neighbourhood, a romance, and one man's anxiety. Like It Ends with Us, it deals with personal experience directly.
- Information density: 28 out of 100
- At roughly 84,000 words, this is a plot-driven romance with a comfortable pace and few threads to track. Its density is close to Beach Read's.
- Narrative indirection: 24 out of 100
- Genre romance tells readers what characters feel and want. The portrayal of Ryan's anxiety is explicit and not left for readers to infer, much like Beach Read.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- The book works at the level of literal events, with a minimal symbolic layer. It sits below Beach Read in symbolic ambition.
- Ironic distance: 14 out of 100
- Reviewers describe a warm, sincere treatment of its hero, with emotional engagement and little gap between what the text says and what it means. It is as direct as It Ends with Us.
- Resolution withholding: 14 out of 100
- Romance conventions promise an emotionally satisfying ending, and the series is marketed as romance. It resolves like Beach Read's genre-expected happy ending.
- Structural complexity: 22 out of 100
- A linear contemporary romance with a single central couple. Its structure matches Beach Read's linear form.
How Tough Guy is regarded
Tough Guy holds a literary regard score of 24 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.
Where the story of Tough Guy takes place
- Canada, 2020s, the main setting