White Man's Grave by Richard Dooling
Published 1994 · 410 pages · 110,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is White Man's Grave to read?
White Man's Grave 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: 50 out of 100
- West African and legal vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Dense, intricate sentences.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Culture clash and American innocence.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Dense with Sierra Leone detail.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Two storylines converge.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Africa, magic carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Dooling maintains critical distance.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Cultures remain apart.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Dual storylines across continents.
How White Man's Grave is regarded
White Man's Grave holds a literary regard score of 56 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.