Young Shoulders by John Wain
Published 1982 · 168 pages · 42,000 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Young Shoulders to read?
Young Shoulders scores 52 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: 52 out of 100
- Simple vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Clear prose.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- Youth, burden, growth.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Contemporary setting.
- Narrative indirection: 52 out of 100
- Third person.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- Shoulders, youth.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Engaged emotion.
- Resolution withholding: 52 out of 100
- Growth achieved.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Linear narrative.
How Young Shoulders is regarded
Young Shoulders holds a literary regard score of 55 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.