Small Rain by Garth Greenwell
Published 2025 · 320 pages · 80,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Small Rain to read?
Small Rain scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. 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: 58 out of 100
- Medical, literary.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Lerner's autofictional prose.
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Body, art, mortality.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Medical, artistic detail.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- First person, essayistic.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- Rain, body, art.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Self-aware narration.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- Health uncertainty.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Hospital narrative.
How Small Rain is regarded
Small Rain holds a literary regard score of 53 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.