Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes by Mem Fox
Published 2008 · 40 pages · 11,000 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Children's Literature
How hard is Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes to read?
Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes scores 50 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately 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: 30 out of 100
- Fox uses plain words a toddler knows: fingers, toes, nose, baby. The rhymes stay at the level of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret or simpler.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Each sentence is short and rhymed, with a repeated refrain. Nothing nests or trails off, so it sits below the simplest diary prose of The Diary of a Young Girl.
- Abstraction: 80 out of 100
- The book stays with bodies, places and babies a child can point to. Its one general idea, that all babies are alike, arrives through pictures, far more concrete than Asterix the Gaul.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- A handful of words per page and one idea carried across the book. Oxenbury's illustrations add detail but ask for little effort.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- Everything is stated outright: a baby is born, it has ten fingers and ten toes. The pictures show setting and mood without hidden meaning.
- Symbolic density: 80 out of 100
- Fingers and toes count the babies and also stand for what they share, but the book makes that plain. The symbolic layer is thinner than in Beach Read.
- Ironic distance: 20 out of 100
- The voice is warm and sincere from the first rhyme to the last kiss. It is as earnest as the Anne Frank diary.
- Resolution withholding: 30 out of 100
- The book closes on the reader's own baby, kissed and counted, a complete and comforting ending. Nothing stays open.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- The structure is a linear, repeating sequence of babies, then one final turn home. It is simpler than the diary form of Anne Frank.
How Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes is regarded
Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes holds a literary regard score of 31 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.