Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
Published 1987 · 95,425 words · about 6 hours at an average pace
How hard is Crossing to Safety to read?
Crossing to Safety scores 49 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: 55 out of 100
- Careful, unshowy vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Well-made sentences of moderate length.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Concrete friendship carrying a quiet argument about character.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Moderate.
- Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
- A retrospective narrator with obvious loyalties.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- The Vermont summers and the illness carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 42 out of 100
- Gentle distance between the narrator's account and his own resentments.
- Resolution withholding: 48 out of 100
- The ending closes the friendship but not the question.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- A retrospective moving between two periods.
How Crossing to Safety is regarded
Crossing to Safety holds a literary regard score of 60 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.