The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne
Published 2017 · 189,200 words · about 13 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Heart's Invisible Furies to read?
The Heart's Invisible Furies scores 48 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: 45 out of 100
- Plain, comic Irish vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Long but easy sentences.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Concrete, spanning seventy years.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- A large cast and a long span.
- Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
- A retrospective narrator, broadly reliable.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- Modest.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- Sustained comic irony about Irish hypocrisy.
- Resolution withholding: 42 out of 100
- Everything resolves, some of it improbably.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- Seven-year jumps across a life.
How The Heart's Invisible Furies is regarded
The Heart's Invisible Furies holds a literary regard score of 43 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.