Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death and Surviving by Julia Samuel
Published 2017 · 290 pages · 92,148 words · about 5 hours at an average pace
How hard is Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death and Surviving to read?
Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death and Surviving scores 26 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: 30 out of 100
- Samuel writes in the plain register of the consulting room. The few clinical terms she uses are explained in the sentence that introduces them.
- Sentence structure: 30 out of 100
- Short sentences and generous white space, with the case histories told largely in reported speech and direct quotation from her clients.
- Abstraction: 38 out of 100
- The book's governing idea — that pain must be felt for grief to move, and that avoidance is what makes it chronic — is abstract, but it is always attached to a named person in a specific loss.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Fifteen case studies grouped by relationship to the dead, followed by practical sections on the pillars of strength. Each case is self-contained, so the reader carries little forward.
How Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death and Surviving is regarded
Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death and Surviving holds a literary regard score of 46 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.