The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers
Published 2012 · 148 pages · 37,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, War Fiction
How hard is The Yellow Birds to read?
The Yellow Birds 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: 45 out of 100
- Military and lyrical vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Long, lyrical sentences.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- War, trauma, and survival.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Dense with Iraq War detail.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Non-linear; trauma fragments.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- Yellow birds, the body carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Powers writes with engaged intensity.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Trauma ongoing.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Non-linear war narrative.
How The Yellow Birds is regarded
The Yellow Birds holds a literary regard score of 57 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.