The Deal by Elle Kennedy
Published 2015 · 94,050 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Romance, Young Adult
How hard is The Deal to read?
The Deal scores 17 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. 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: 22 out of 100
- Kennedy writes in plain contemporary American English, with campus slang and hockey talk that any reader follows. It sits close to Beach Read and It Ends with Us in accessibility.
- Sentence structure: 24 out of 100
- Sentences are short, conversational and dialogue-heavy, with banter driving most scenes. The syntax is simpler than Beach Read's.
- Abstraction: 24 out of 100
- The story stays with concrete events: tutoring sessions, dates, games and parties. Garrett's philosophy class adds a light layer of ideas, but it never leads the book.
- Information density: 25 out of 100
- The plot is a single romance thread with a small cast, and each reveal arrives gently. It reads at a comfortable pace like Beach Read.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Hannah and Garrett narrate their feelings and motives in alternating first-person chapters, so little is left to inference. Hannah's past comes out gradually but is stated plainly.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- The deal and the hockey rink serve the plot rather than carrying a symbolic layer. Meaning stays on the surface, as in Beach Read.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- The humor is playful banter and the emotion is sincere. The book asks for no reading against the narrators.
- Resolution withholding: 14 out of 100
- The book follows the romance formula and ends with the couple together. Conflicts resolve cleanly, like the happy ending of Beach Read.
- Structural complexity: 15 out of 100
- The structure is linear and alternates between two first-person narrators. It has no timeline games or formal experiments.
How The Deal is regarded
The Deal holds a literary regard score of 19 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.