Mog the Forgetful Cat by Judith Kerr
Published 2000 · 40 pages · 11,000 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Children's Literature
How hard is Mog the Forgetful Cat to read?
Mog the Forgetful Cat scores 80 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
- Kerr uses short, everyday words that a beginning reader can manage. The vocabulary sits close to Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret in simplicity, and simpler still.
- Sentence structure: 80 out of 100
- Sentences are brief and declarative, built for reading aloud to small children. Even Anne Frank's diary has more complex syntax.
- Abstraction: 80 out of 100
- The story stays with concrete events: a cat, a kitchen, a burglar. Even Asterix the Gaul asks for more abstraction.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Each page carries one small event and a picture. Compared with The Diary of a Young Girl, the density is very light.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- Events are shown plainly: Mog forgets, Mog saves the day. The pictures add jokes, but readers do little inferring.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- Mog's forgetfulness is a comic trait, not a symbol system. It carries less symbolic weight than Beach Read.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- The humor is gentle and affectionate, with a small gap between what Mog thinks and what readers see. It stays far from the irony of adult satire and close to the sincerity of Margaret.
- Resolution withholding: 40 out of 100
- The burglary is solved, Mog is praised, and the family is safe. It closes as neatly as a genre romance such as Beach Read.
- Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
- The picture book moves in a simple line from daily muddles to a night-time crisis to a happy ending. It is as linear as Anne Frank's diary.
How Mog the Forgetful Cat is regarded
Mog the Forgetful Cat holds a literary regard score of 34 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.