How long does it take to read The Quick and the Dead?
The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams takes about 5 hours 39 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 39 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2000. 308 pages, about 84,700 words. Written for young adults.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 25 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 39 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 32 minutes |
The page count is the median across 5 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
"Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned landscape eccentric with signs and portents - from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wild-life museum - accompanied by restless, confounded adults. A father lusts after his handsome gardener even as he's haunted (literally) by his dead wife; a heartbroken dog runs afoul of an angry neighbor; a young stroke victim drifts westward, his luck running from worse to awful; a sickly musician for whom Alice develops an attraction is drawn instead toward darker imaginings and solutions; and an aging big-game hunter finds spiritual renewal through his infatuation with an eight-year-old - the formidable Emily Bliss Pickless. With nature thoroughly routed and the ambiguities of existence on full display, life and death continue in directions both invisible and apparent."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: Teenage girls, Maternal deprivation, Orphans, Bildungsromans, Fiction, Suburban life
