The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw
Published 2023 · 35,200 words · about 3 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Salt Grows Heavy to read?
The Salt Grows Heavy scores 58 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
- Lush, deliberately archaic vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Long, ornate sentences.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- Concrete horror in a fairy-tale register.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Light; a novella.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- A narrator whose nature is withheld.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- The mermaid and the surgeons are sustained figures.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Distance between the beauty of the prose and the violence.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- Little is explained.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- A frame with embedded tales.
How The Salt Grows Heavy is regarded
The Salt Grows Heavy holds a literary regard score of 33 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.