Dogger by Shirley Hughes
Published 2010 · 32 pages · 8,800 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Children's Literature
How hard is Dogger to read?
Dogger scores 90 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. 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: 80 out of 100
- Hughes writes in short, everyday words that suit a child being read to or just learning to read. Compared with Judy Blume's Margaret book, the vocabulary is simpler still.
- Sentence structure: 80 out of 100
- Sentences are brief and declarative, and the page layout keeps each unit of text small. Anne Frank's diary has longer, more varied syntax than this picture book.
- Abstraction: 100 out of 100
- Everything is concrete: a lost toy, a family, a fair, a swap. The emotions of love and loss come through objects and actions, which makes it more tangible than Judy Blume's coming-of-age questions.
- Information density: 80 out of 100
- Only a handful of events and a few characters across a short book, with the illustrations adding household and fair detail. It is lighter than Beach Read.
- Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100
- The plot is stated plainly, and the images show what the words skip, such as Dave's sadness. Readers infer very little, so it is more direct than Asterix.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- Dogger stands for comfort and attachment, and Bella's trade for love between siblings, but the book never signals deeper allegory. It is far more literal than the Diary of a Young Girl's reflective passages.
- Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
- The tone is sincere and warm throughout, with no gap between what the text says and what Hughes means. It sits near the sincere voice of Judy Blume's Margaret.
- Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
- Dave loses Dogger and the story ends with the problem solved and the siblings closer. Closure is as complete as in a genre romance, with no ambiguity left.
- Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
- A linear story of loss, search and recovery told in picture-book spreads. It is simpler than the structure of Anne Frank's diary.
How Dogger is regarded
Dogger holds a literary regard score of 49 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.