Burntcoat by Sarah Hall
Published 2021 · 224 pages · 56,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Burntcoat to read?
Burntcoat scores 51 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: 45 out of 100
- Hall writes in lyrical, sensuous prose that occasionally reaches toward the poetic. The vocabulary is evocative rather than difficult.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Sentences can be long and flowing, mimicking the movement of memory and sensation. The prose rewards slow, attentive reading.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- The novel is deeply embodied—taste, touch, illness, desire. Abstract themes of mortality and meaning are explored through physical experience.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- The narrative is associative rather than densely plotted. Meaning accumulates through image and sensation rather than packed incident.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Memory and desire blur together. The narrator tells her story slantwise, through what she remembers and how she remembers it.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Fire, food, the pandemic, the sculptures she creates—Hall builds a web of interconnected images that resonate without being schematic.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- The narrator is too immersed in her experience for irony. This is intimate confession, not detached observation.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- The novel moves toward inevitable loss while finding moments of grace within it. The ending is elegiac rather than conclusive.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Past and present interweave as the narrator pieces together her story. The structure is nonlinear but emotionally coherent.
How Burntcoat is regarded
Burntcoat holds a literary regard score of 54 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.