The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards
Published 2005 · 401 pages · 110,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is The Memory Keeper's Daughter to read?
The Memory Keeper's Daughter 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: 22 out of 100
- Accessible literary prose. Some medical terminology.
- Sentence structure: 25 out of 100
- Abstraction: 22 out of 100
- Concrete domestic drama spanning decades.
- Information density: 35 out of 100
- Character-driven. Twenty-five years of consequences.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Multiple perspectives across decades. The secret drives dramatic irony.
- Symbolic density: 20 out of 100
- Photographs as frozen moments. Snow as concealment.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- The reader knows what the characters do not.
- Resolution withholding: 22 out of 100
- The secret's revelation comes late. Some damage is irreversible.
- Structural complexity: 22 out of 100
- Alternating perspectives across twenty-five years.
How The Memory Keeper's Daughter is regarded
The Memory Keeper's Daughter holds a literary regard score of 28 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.