Get in Trouble by Kelly Link
Published 2016 · 352 pages · 88,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Short Fiction
How hard is Get in Trouble to read?
Get in Trouble 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: 42 out of 100
- Link writes in playful, contemporary prose with genre vocabulary from horror, science fiction, and fantasy woven throughout. The language is accessible and inventive.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Sentences are smooth and readable, with Link's style serving her strange situations with deceptive clarity. The prose is inviting.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- The stories ground surreal situations in recognizable emotional terrain. Supernatural elements illuminate ordinary human concerns about love, loss, and growing up.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Each story establishes its own strange rules. Link provides enough information to follow while maintaining productive mystery.
- Narrative indirection: 60 out of 100
- Stories often withhold explanation of their supernatural premises. What exactly is happening and why remains deliberately unclear.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- The fantastical elements function symbolically—the summer people, the sentient dolls, the superhero exes. Link makes her metaphors literal and strange.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Link maintains a playful, slightly askew perspective on her material. Dark comedy threads through even the strangest and saddest stories.
- Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
- Stories often end ambiguously, with mysteries unresolved and implications hanging. Link prefers openings to closures.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Stand-alone stories with their own internal logics. Each requires entering a new strange world; the collection rewards flexibility.
How Get in Trouble is regarded
Get in Trouble holds a literary regard score of 59 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.