A Council of Dolls by Mona Susan Power
Published 2023 · 267 pages · 66,750 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is A Council of Dolls to read?
A Council of Dolls scores 40 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: 32 out of 100
- Clear prose with Dakota language and cultural terms.
- Sentence structure: 35 out of 100
- Three generational voices, each clear and distinct.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- Questions of identity, trauma, and heritage through experience.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Historical detail across three generations efficiently conveyed.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- Three perspectives gradually reveal family secrets.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- The dolls connect generations and carry cultural meaning.
- Ironic distance: 30 out of 100
- Power writes with clear empathy for her characters.
- Resolution withholding: 40 out of 100
- Family threads resolve while historical trauma continues.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Three women across generations, alternating voices.
How A Council of Dolls is regarded
A Council of Dolls holds a literary regard score of 54 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.