Quest by Aaron Becker
Published 2014 · 40 pages · 11,000 words · Children's Literature, Fantasy
How hard is Quest to read?
Quest scores 18 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. 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: 20 out of 100
- Quest is a wordless picture book, so it has no vocabulary to decode. Even Judy Blume's young adult prose asks more of a reader's word knowledge.
- Sentence structure: 10 out of 100
- With no sentences on the page, the book makes no grammatical demands. Anne Frank's diary is far more demanding at the sentence level.
- Abstraction: 15 out of 100
- Two children follow a map to rescue a captured king, and every step is a concrete image: the sea, the bridge, the winged friend. Like Asterix the Gaul, it is adventure shown rather than argued.
- Information density: 22 out of 100
- Each of its 40 pages holds a detailed scene with objects, creatures and landscapes to track, and the map and markers matter to the plot. The density is visual and light compared with prose novels such as Beach Read.
- Narrative indirection: 35 out of 100
- Without words, readers infer the king's capture, the purpose of the objects and the children's goals from the pictures alone. Like Asterix the Gaul, the action stays clear, but the reader must supply the story that text would normally state.
- Symbolic density: 25 out of 100
- The hidden door, the map and the coloured markers work as fantasy devices more than layered allegory. The darkness threatening the kingdom is a plain, signposted menace, close to the simple register of Asterix the Gaul.
- Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
- The tone is earnest wonder and adventure, with children rescuing a king from darkness. There is no gap between what the book shows and what it means, much like the sincere voice of Judy Blume's Margaret.
- Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
- The rescue quest aims at a clear goal, and Quest is a middle volume of a trilogy that continues with Return. That leaves some threads open for the next book, though the adventure itself is a self-contained arc, like the closure of a genre story.
- Structural complexity: 15 out of 100
- The journey runs in a linear sequence through the sea, a tropical paradise, a perilous bridge and the sky. Its structure is as simple as Anne Frank's linear diary, with no time jumps or shifting viewpoints.
How Quest is regarded
Quest holds a literary regard score of 30 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.