Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington
Published 1922 · 168 pages · 87,267 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Alice Adams to read?
Alice Adams scores 41 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
- Period American prose, accessible and precise.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Controlled sentences with social observation.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- Class and aspiration explored through Alice's struggles.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Midwestern social world efficiently depicted.
- Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
- Alice's self-deception creates gaps for readers.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- Social climbing, the family carry symbolic weight.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Tarkington's sympathy operates through gentle irony.
- Resolution withholding: 40 out of 100
- Alice's fate decided but future uncertain.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Straightforward narrative following Alice.
How Alice Adams is regarded
Alice Adams holds a literary regard score of 45 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.