Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom by Sylvia Plath
Published 1900 · 17,600 words · about 1 hour at an average pace
How hard is Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom to read?
Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom scores 55 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
- Formal, slightly archaic diction.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Measured sentences.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- A train journey that is entirely allegory.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Light; it is very short.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- A third person tied to a girl who does not understand where she is.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- Everything in the story stands for something else.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Some distance between the surface journey and its meaning.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- The allegory is never explained.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- A single linear journey.
How Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom is regarded
Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom holds a literary regard score of 47 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.