No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod
Published 2001 · 283 pages · 70,750 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is No Great Mischief to read?
No Great Mischief scores 54 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. 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: 50 out of 100
- Cape Breton vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- MacLeod elegiac prose.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Family and clan.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Dense Scottish-Canadian.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Memory-driven narrative.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- Clan, blood, land.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Elegiac engagement.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Past shapes present.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Memory structure.
How No Great Mischief is regarded
No Great Mischief holds a literary regard score of 59 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.