The Bees by Laline Paull
Published 2015 · 352 pages · 88,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Fantasy, Literary Fiction
How hard is The Bees to read?
The Bees scores 54 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: 55 out of 100
- Bee biology vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Paull's clear prose.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Society, conformity.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Hive detail.
- Narrative indirection: 52 out of 100
- Third person, bee view.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- Hive as society.
- Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
- Allegorical distance.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Cycle continues.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- Seasonal structure.
How The Bees is regarded
The Bees holds a literary regard score of 56 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.