All Souls' Rising by Madison Smartt Bell
Published 1995 · 582 pages · 146,000 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is All Souls' Rising to read?
All Souls' Rising scores 50 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: 45 out of 100
- Haitian Creole, French, and period vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Multiple registers matching different characters.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Revolution and violence through multiple perspectives.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Dense with Haitian Revolution history.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Multiple perspectives require active assembly.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Vodou, the uprising, slavery carry symbolic weight.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Bell presents without moralizing.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- First of trilogy; revolution continues.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Multiple storylines across Haitian Revolution.
How All Souls' Rising is regarded
All Souls' Rising holds a literary regard score of 58 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.