Proper English by KJ Charles
Published 2019 · 60,000 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · historical romance, cozy mystery, lgbtq+ fiction, historical fiction
How hard is Proper English to read?
Proper English scores 33 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: 36 out of 100
- Edwardian idiom, shooting-party terminology, and country-house vocabulary, all clear in context. Period flavor over an accessible contemporary base.
- Sentence structure: 33 out of 100
- Brisk, clear sentences from a single practical point of view. Dialogue does the heavy lifting; nothing requires re-parsing.
- Abstraction: 28 out of 100
- Resolutely concrete: guns, dinners, blackmail notes, flooded roads. Ideas about propriety and justice emerge entirely from who says what at the table.
- Information density: 37 out of 100
- A full house-party cast with interlocking secrets, alibis, and grudges to track in fair-play mystery fashion. Moderate density typical of a well-plotted cozy.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- Whodunit withholding filtered through one observer's limited view, plus a comedy-of-manners surface where most characters say the opposite of what they mean. Guided inference, fully resolved by the end.
- Symbolic density: 26 out of 100
- Light motif work: marksmanship as female competence, and the 'proper English' of the title doing quiet ironic duty. The story operates literally throughout.
- Ironic distance: 40 out of 100
- A sustained gap between drawing-room politeness and what everyone actually knows, with the title itself an ironic verdict. Genre-aware wit around a sincere emotional core.
- Resolution withholding: 30 out of 100
- The murder is solved and the romance closes warmly, but the resolution deliberately leaves a moral aftertaste about law versus justice. Genre closure with one raised eyebrow.
- Structural complexity: 28 out of 100
- Single point of view, linear timeline, classic isolated-house-party construction. Deliberately traditional architecture.
How Proper English is regarded
Proper English holds a literary regard score of 24 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.