An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge
Published 1990 · 205 pages · 51,250 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is An Awfully Big Adventure to read?
An Awfully Big Adventure scores 48 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: 38 out of 100
- 1950s British theater vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Controlled sentences following Stella's perspective.
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- Coming-of-age with darker undercurrents.
- Information density: 42 out of 100
- Provincial theater world efficiently depicted.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Stella doesn't understand what readers can see.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- Peter Pan, the theater, innocence lost carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Bainbridge's irony toward characters sustained.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Revelations come but meaning remains.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Limited perspective creating dramatic irony.
How An Awfully Big Adventure is regarded
An Awfully Big Adventure holds a literary regard score of 61 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.