The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
Published 2002 · 90,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Thriller & Suspense
How hard is The Lovely Bones to read?
The Lovely Bones scores 23 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: 22 out of 100
- A teenager's voice. Simple, precise vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 25 out of 100
- Abstraction: 25 out of 100
- Concrete narration from an unusual vantage point.
- Information density: 35 out of 100
- Moderate. Character portraits accumulate over years.
- Narrative indirection: 22 out of 100
- Dead narrator observing the living. Time skips across years.
- Symbolic density: 25 out of 100
- Heaven as witness stand. The cornfield. Bones as connection.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- Susie's detachment gives grief an eerie clarity.
- Resolution withholding: 20 out of 100
- The killer is not caught through justice. Ambiguous closure.
- Structural complexity: 22 out of 100
- Omniscient dead narrator spanning years. Linear but expansive.
How The Lovely Bones is regarded
The Lovely Bones holds a literary regard score of 32 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.