Elmer by David McKee
Published 1989 · 32 pages · 8,800 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Children's Literature
How hard is Elmer to read?
Elmer 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: 60 out of 100
- McKee writes in everyday words a young child knows: elephant, colours, laugh, rain. Even the Beach Read level of plain contemporary diction is more demanding than Elmer.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Sentences are short and repeat patterns, so the book reads aloud easily. There are no nested clauses. It is simpler than the diary syntax of Anne Frank.
- Abstraction: 14 out of 100
- The story is a concrete sequence: a patchwork elephant, berries, a grey disguise, rain, a parade. The idea that being different is fine surfaces only through these events, much as in Asterix the Gaul's plain adventure.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Each page holds one small event and one bright image. The book has a few characters, a single setting and no secondary plot.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- The narrator says what Elmer feels and does. Children need to infer only that the herd's silence is dull and that Elmer's joke is the herd's cue to laugh.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- The patchwork skin stands for individuality, and the berry juice for conformity. Both are plain, signposted images with no hidden layer.
- Ironic distance: 80 out of 100
- The tone is warm and sincere. The gentle humour comes when the grey Elmer sits unrecognised among the elephants.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- The plot closes: the disguise washes off, the herd laughs and the parade becomes a yearly tradition. Nothing is left open.
- Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
- The story is linear: the problem, the disguise, the reveal and the celebration. There are no time shifts or changes of narrator.
How Elmer is regarded
Elmer holds a literary regard score of 39 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.