Ghettoside by Jill Leovy
Published 2015 · 110,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Journalism & Reportage, Mystery & Crime, Nonfiction
How hard is Ghettoside to read?
Ghettoside scores 22 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
- Clear journalistic prose with some police terminology.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- Concrete true crime with embedded systemic analysis.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Dense with case details, statistics, and community context.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Chronological investigation narrative with analytical interludes.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- The Tennelle case represents the broader failure of justice.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Leovy writes with controlled anger and analytical precision.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- The case resolves, but the systemic problem persists.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Interleaved narrative and analytical chapters.
How Ghettoside is regarded
Ghettoside holds a literary regard score of 44 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.