That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott
Published 2010 · 368 pages · 80,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is That Deadman Dance to read?
That Deadman Dance scores 36 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: 40 out of 100
- Noongar vocabulary integrated into English prose. Nineteenth-century colonial language. Whaling terminology.
- Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
- Abstraction: 38 out of 100
- Concrete historical narrative that embodies abstract arguments about colonialism through character and event.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Dense with cultural, historical, and linguistic detail. Rich recreation of early colonial contact.
- Narrative indirection: 35 out of 100
- Non-linear chronology. The reader knows the outcome; the tragedy is in watching hope erode.
- Symbolic density: 42 out of 100
- Dance, language, the whale, the land—each carries layered cultural and colonial symbolism.
- Ironic distance: 30 out of 100
- Dramatic irony pervades: the reader knows what Bobby cannot about the settlers' ultimate intentions.
- Resolution withholding: 28 out of 100
- The colonial betrayal is historically inevitable but emotionally devastating in its gradual revelation.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Non-linear timeline with multiple perspectives across decades of colonial encounter.
How That Deadman Dance is regarded
That Deadman Dance holds a literary regard score of 59 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.