Booth by Karen Joy Fowler
Published 2022 · 480 pages · 120,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is Booth to read?
Booth scores 50 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. 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: 48 out of 100
- Civil War and theatrical vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Varied, period-inflected sentences.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Family, fame, and American violence.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Dense with theatrical and Civil War history.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Known ending creates dramatic irony.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Theater, assassination carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Fowler maintains knowing distance.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- Known history; family revealed.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Multi-generational with known climax.
How Booth is regarded
Booth holds a literary regard score of 57 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.