A Week to Be Wicked by Tessa Dare
Published 2012 · 1 pages · 90,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Romance
How hard is A Week to Be Wicked to read?
A Week to Be Wicked 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: 25 out of 100
- Geological terminology from Minerva's expertise. Regency social vocabulary. Both deployed for comedic effect.
- Sentence structure: 22 out of 100
- Witty, fast-paced prose. Dare's dialogue is sharp and her narration moves like a comedy script.
- Abstraction: 20 out of 100
- The feminist argument is embedded in character—Minerva's scientific competence is the plot, not a theme.
- Information density: 22 out of 100
- Road-trip structure keeps the pacing brisk. Geological and Regency details add flavor without weight.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Dual POV, linear road-trip timeline. The direction is always Edinburgh.
- Symbolic density: 22 out of 100
- The fossil as female intellectual achievement. The road as liberation from social constraint. The fake engagement as real courtship.
- Ironic distance: 28 out of 100
- Dare writes Regency manners with modern feminist irony. The comedy depends on the gap between social expectation and character desire.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- Full romantic and professional resolution. Minerva gets both the man and the scientific career.
- Structural complexity: 18 out of 100
- Linear road-trip structure with episodic misadventures. Clean and propulsive.
How A Week to Be Wicked is regarded
A Week to Be Wicked holds a literary regard score of 53 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.