Small Great Things
Published 2016 · 510 pages · 140,250 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Mystery & Crime
How hard is Small Great Things to read?
Small Great Things scores 30 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: 27 out of 100
- Picoult writes plain contemporary prose with some medical and legal terms, which the story explains as needed. It sits near Beach Read and It Ends with Us in accessibility.
- Sentence structure: 27 out of 100
- Sentences are short and direct, and chapters move quickly between first-person voices. The syntax asks little of the reader, much like Beach Read.
- Abstraction: 38 out of 100
- The novel grounds racism and privilege in a concrete trial, a hospital room and a family. Its ideas arrive through events and dialogue, not theory, similar to To Kill a Mockingbird though more direct.
- Information density: 38 out of 100
- The plot carries courtroom procedure, neonatal medicine and white-power movement background. The pace is manageable and each revelation is explained, closer to The Housemaid than to anything dense.
- Narrative indirection: 28 out of 100
- Ruth, Kennedy and Turk each state their feelings and beliefs openly in first person. Readers infer little beyond the characters' blind spots, especially Kennedy's.
- Symbolic density: 28 out of 100
- The baby, the tattoo and the nurse's hands carry obvious meaning, but the story works mainly at the literal level of a trial. It has a thin symbolic layer, close to Beach Read, though with clearer signposts.
- Ironic distance: 28 out of 100
- The book is earnest and gives its characters sincere voices, with some irony in Kennedy's belief that she is free of bias. It engages emotionally and directly, like It Ends with Us.
- Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
- The trial builds to a verdict and the characters' arcs reach definite points, with a twist near the end. Closure is the genre expectation here, as in Beach Read.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Three alternating narrators and a before-and-after trial frame give the book more shape than a simple linear tale. Chapters stay short and the timeline is easy to follow, though it is more structured than Beach Read.
How Small Great Things is regarded
Small Great Things holds a literary regard score of 34 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.