The Mother by Grazia Deledda
Published 1920 · 256 pages · 47,046 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is The Mother to read?
The Mother scores 50 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: 52 out of 100
- Chinese in translation.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Buck's clear prose.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Motherhood, China.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Rural China.
- Narrative indirection: 48 out of 100
- Third person.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Mother, earth.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Engaged sympathy.
- Resolution withholding: 48 out of 100
- Life cycle.
- Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
- Linear narrative.
How The Mother is regarded
The Mother holds a literary regard score of 62 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.