Divines by Ellie Eaton
Published 2021 · 320 pages · 92,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · literary fiction, coming-of-age, psychological fiction
How hard is Divines to read?
Divines 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: 36 out of 100
- Eaton's prose is clean literary English, dense with British boarding-school argot — house names, uniform rituals, class-coded slang the Divines use to mark themselves off from local 'townies.' The vocabulary is never obscure, but readers unfamiliar with English public-school culture will meet unfamiliar institutional terms every few pages.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Sentences are controlled and declarative, built for momentum rather than difficulty, closer to The Great Gatsby's balanced clauses than to any maximalist style. Eaton favors precise, image-driven sentences over subordination or stream of consciousness.
- Abstraction: 46 out of 100
- The novel works through concrete scene and memory rather than argument, but the retrospective frame keeps pulling individual incidents toward larger claims about class, complicity, and inherited privilege. Like Gatsby, it uses a specific social milieu to probe abstract questions about culpability.
- Information density: 38 out of 100
- A single narrator, a small cast of schoolgirls, and two time periods (school years and adult present) keep the informational load light. The density comes from accumulating social detail — hierarchies, nicknames, rituals — rather than plot complexity or reference.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- Josephine narrates from adulthood, circling the central act of violence she took part in without naming it directly for long stretches, forcing readers to assemble what happened from deflections and partial admissions. Her adult self is visibly editing her own past, in the mode of Nick Carraway's selective retrospection.
- Symbolic density: 46 out of 100
- The school building itself — St John the Divine, since sold off and converted into flats — carries most of the novel's symbolic weight, standing for a decayed, self-mythologizing institution the narrator can't fully leave behind. The 'Divines' nickname the girls claim for themselves doubles as an ironic marker of their entitlement.
- Ironic distance: 54 out of 100
- The gap between how the teenage Divines see themselves — untouchable, glamorous, above the town — and how the adult narrator now judges that entitlement drives most of the book's tension. Eaton lets period detail and class snobbery indict the girls without editorial comment, similar to Fitzgerald's sympathy-and-critique balance.
- Resolution withholding: 44 out of 100
- The central act of cruelty and its consequences are eventually laid out fully, giving the novel a resolved emotional arc rather than lingering ambiguity. What stays open is moral, not factual: whether the narrator's adult remorse actually amounts to accountability.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- The novel crosscuts a pregnant, adult Josephine revisiting her old school with an extended flashback to her final years as a student, building toward the incident both timelines circle. It's a manageable dual-timeline structure, more demanding than a straight chronology but far short of fragmented or multi-narrator experiments.
How Divines is regarded
Divines holds a literary regard score of 19 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.