Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor
Published 2017 · 320 pages · 92,442 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · LGBTQ+ Fiction, Literary Fiction, Magical Realism
How hard is Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl to read?
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl scores 29 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: 28 out of 100
- 1990s queer subcultural vocabulary. Literary references. Sex-positive frankness requires no euphemism.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Abstraction: 38 out of 100
- The shapeshifting is a literal metaphor for gender theory. Queer theory made flesh.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Dense with 1990s queer cultural specificity: festivals, bars, political fights, subcultural codes.
- Narrative indirection: 22 out of 100
- Picaresque structure: episodic, city-to-city, encounter-to-encounter.
- Symbolic density: 42 out of 100
- Paul's shifting body is a walking symbol. The title references Ovid. Gender itself is the symbolic terrain.
- Ironic distance: 30 out of 100
- Paul is self-aware and sardonic about his own shapeshifting. Lawlor is wry about identity politics.
- Resolution withholding: 22 out of 100
- Picaresque novels resist closure. Paul's journey has no destination, which is the point.
- Structural complexity: 22 out of 100
- Episodic picaresque. Each chapter a new city, a new body, a new encounter.
How Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is regarded
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl holds a literary regard score of 39 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.