Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher
Published 1994 · 304 pages · 80,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls to read?
Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls scores 38 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: 50 out of 100
- Accessible clinical prose written for general readers.
- Sentence structure: 46 out of 100
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- Cultural and psychological theory carried through case studies.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Rich with case material and cultural observation; paced for broad readership.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Cases illuminate the argument without being evasive about the central claims.
- Symbolic density: 16 out of 100
- The Ophelia figure functions as an organizing symbol throughout.
- Ironic distance: 14 out of 100
- Measured clinical tone; irony directed at cultural patterns.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- Reaches conclusions about causes and partial recommendations about response.
- Structural complexity: 28 out of 100
- Organized around themes and case studies; accessible structure.
How Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls is regarded
Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls holds a literary regard score of 48 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.