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How long does it take to read Black and Blue?

a novel

Anna Quindlen

Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen takes about 5 hours 22 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 5 hours 22 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1998. 293 pages, about 80,575 words.

11 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 8 hours 57 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 5 hours 22 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 3 hours 21 minutes

The page count is the median across 11 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

In Black and Blue, Fran Benedetto tells a spellbinding story: how at nineteen she fell in love with Bobby Benedetto, how their passionate marriage became a nightmare, why she stayed, and what happened on the night she finally decided to run away with her ten-year-old son and start a new life under a new name. Living in fear in Florida - yet with increasing confidence, freedom, and hope - Fran unravels the complex threads of family, identity, and desire that shape a woman's life, even as she begins to create a new one. As Fran starts to heal from the pain of the past, she almost believes she has escaped it - that Bobby Benedetto will not find her and again provoke the complex combustion between them of attraction and destruction, lust and love. Black and Blue is a story in which Anna Quindlen writes about the real lives of men and women, the varieties of people and love, the bonds between mother and child, the solace of family and friendship, the inexplicable feelings between people who are passionately connected in ways they don't understand.

Subjects: Mothers and sons, Man-woman relationships, Abused wives, Fiction, Love, Wife abuse

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