Enormous Wings by Laurie Frankel
Published 2026 · 80,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Feminist Literature
How hard is Enormous Wings to read?
Enormous Wings scores 30 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. 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: 28 out of 100
- Frankel writes contemporary commercial literary fiction, and the premise of a 77-year-old in a retirement community points to plain, accessible language. Expect something close to Beach Read in register, with some medical and bioethical terms.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- A 304-page mainstream hardcover aimed at a broad readership suggests clear contemporary sentence structure. It sits near Beach Read and well below the demanding stylists.
- Abstraction: 33 out of 100
- The story rests on a concrete situation: a woman in a retirement home, a diagnosis, public attention. The blurb's questions of agency, autonomy and mortality come through personal events, much as in It Ends with Us.
- Information density: 30 out of 100
- A single-protagonist novel with a clear premise and a manageable cast of children, friends and outside parties suggests a light reading load. The medical and media threads add some detail but not heavy density.
- Narrative indirection: 28 out of 100
- The blurb describes a direct, plot-driven situation, and Frankel's mainstream approach suggests readers are told what characters feel and want. Little inference is likely to be required, in the manner of Beach Read.
- Symbolic density: 30 out of 100
- The title hints at imagery, but the described premise is a literal, issue-driven story about pregnancy and aging. Symbolism likely stays light, closer to Beach Read than to The Remains of the Day.
- Ironic distance: 30 out of 100
- The setup carries absurdist potential, yet Frankel's reputation for warm, earnest fiction suggests sincere engagement with Pepper and her choices. The tone is closer to It Ends with Us than to satire.
- Resolution withholding: 32 out of 100
- The blurb stresses hard decisions Pepper must face, which implies a story that works toward an answer. Commercial literary fiction of this kind usually delivers emotional closure, as in It Ends with Us.
- Structural complexity: 27 out of 100
- Nothing in the description suggests timeline experiments or multiple narrators. A linear story following Pepper from the move to her diagnosis and its aftermath fits the simple structure of Beach Read.
How Enormous Wings is regarded
Enormous Wings holds a literary regard score of 21 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.