Highwire Moon by Susan Straight
Published 2001 · 363 pages · 88,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Highwire Moon to read?
Highwire Moon scores 42 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: 40 out of 100
- Spanish and English; agricultural vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Clear, direct sentences.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Immigration and family separation.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Dense with border crossing detail.
- Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
- Mother and daughter perspectives.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- The border as central symbol.
- Ironic distance: 35 out of 100
- Straight writes with compassion.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- Reunion achieved; costs remain.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Dual perspectives over time.
How Highwire Moon is regarded
Highwire Moon holds a literary regard score of 51 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.