Dance on My Grave by Aidan Chambers
Published 1982 · 69,025 words · about 5 hours at an average pace
How hard is Dance on My Grave to read?
Dance on My Grave scores 55 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
- Teenage vocabulary with deliberate stylistic games.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Varied by section — some fragments, some running prose.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- Concrete grief, formally handled.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Moderate.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- A boy writing under court order, editing himself.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The grave and the letters carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
- Distance between what Hal writes and what he means.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- The court case closes; the feeling does not.
- Structural complexity: 68 out of 100
- Newspaper clippings, footnotes and shifting person — ambitious for YA.
How Dance on My Grave is regarded
Dance on My Grave holds a literary regard score of 47 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.