Rag and Bone by KJ Charles
Published 2016 · 55,000 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · fantasy romance, historical fantasy, lgbtq+ fiction, victorian fiction
How hard is Rag and Bone to read?
Rag and Bone scores 34 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: 37 out of 100
- Victorian street and trade vocabulary plus invented magical terminology — graphomancy, warlocks, the justiciary — all defined in use. Slightly above contemporary genre baseline for the period-and-fantasy blend.
- Sentence structure: 34 out of 100
- Clean, propulsive sentences in close third person with period inflection in dialogue. Built for pace; no structural parsing demands.
- Abstraction: 32 out of 100
- A concrete magical-crime plot carries ideas about power, consent, and what counts as corruption. The thinking stays welded to specific dangers — spelled paper, drawn blood — rather than drifting into abstraction.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Denser than a standalone romance: a magic system with rules, a shared series world with recurring institutions and cameos, and a mystery plot all run at once. Readers new to the Charm of Magpies world track more than usual for the genre.
- Narrative indirection: 38 out of 100
- A whodunit thread about who is working harmful magic through London's waste trade, with motives concealed until the reveal. Otherwise direct dual-perspective storytelling.
- Symbolic density: 34 out of 100
- The rag-and-bone trade — discards turned back into value — quietly mirrors the book's questions about tainted origins and honest use, and magic doubles as a figure for otherness. Motifs enrich a story that works fully at face value.
- Ironic distance: 36 out of 100
- Wit in the banter and some dry observation of Victorian propriety, but the emotional register is earnest: fear, shame, and loyalty are meant straight. Modest genre-aware irony only.
- Resolution withholding: 26 out of 100
- The magical threat is resolved, the couple's central conflict is settled, and the ending closes firmly in romance-genre fashion, with the larger series world open around it.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Linear chronology with two alternating points of view, following on from the short prequel A Queer Trade. Conventional and easy to navigate.
How Rag and Bone is regarded
Rag and Bone 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.