A Kindness to the Children by Joan Riley
Published 1997 · 312 pages · 78,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is A Kindness to the Children to read?
A Kindness to the Children scores 39 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: 35 out of 100
- Clear contemporary prose.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Controlled sentences.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- Questions of care and responsibility.
- Information density: 38 out of 100
- Efficiently told story.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- Shows rather than tells.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- Children and kindness carry thematic weight.
- Ironic distance: 35 out of 100
- Sympathetic treatment.
- Resolution withholding: 40 out of 100
- Meaningful but modest resolution.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Straightforward narrative.
How A Kindness to the Children is regarded
A Kindness to the Children holds a literary regard score of 48 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.