The Push by Ashley Audrain
Published 2021 · 290 pages · 78,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Thriller & Suspense
How hard is The Push to read?
The Push scores 46 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: 32 out of 100
- Audrain writes in direct, stripped-down prose. The simplicity is deliberate—you're in Blythe's head, and she's not reaching for fancy words. She's reaching for her daughter.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Short sentences, second-person address to the husband. The syntax is urgent, breathless. You read fast because the prose demands it.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Questions about maternal instinct, inherited trauma, and what we see in our children run deep. But Audrain grounds them in specific, visceral scenes.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Three timelines—Blythe's childhood, her motherhood, her mother's past. The density is emotional more than informational.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- Is Violet dangerous or is Blythe projecting? Audrain refuses to answer definitively. The unreliable narration is the novel's engine.
- Symbolic density: 42 out of 100
- The push itself—literal and metaphorical. Violet's drawings. The mother-line of damaged women. Symbols cluster around the central question.
- Ironic distance: 35 out of 100
- Audrain writes with intensity, not distance. You're trapped in Blythe's perspective, feeling her terror. No wry detachment here.
- Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
- The ending refuses to confirm or deny Blythe's interpretation. Was she right about Violet? Audrain deliberately withholds closure.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Second-person narration, three timelines, the constant question of reliability. The structure serves the psychological suspense.
How The Push is regarded
The Push holds a literary regard score of 45 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.