The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
Published 2016 · 1 pages · 120,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is The Story of the Lost Child to read?
The Story of the Lost Child 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
- Italian in translation.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Ferrante flowing prose.
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Friendship, class, identity.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Naples, Italy.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- First person.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- Lost child, neighborhood.
- Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
- Engaged narrator.
- Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
- Series conclusion.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Linear with flashbacks.
How The Story of the Lost Child is regarded
The Story of the Lost Child holds a literary regard score of 48 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.