The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley by Shaun David Hutchinson
Young Adult, Coming-of-Age, LGBTQ+ Fiction
How hard is The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley to read?
The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley scores 33 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: 27 out of 100
- A contemporary young adult novel aimed at teen readers, so the vocabulary is plain and current. It sits near Beach Read and It Ends with Us in accessibility.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Young adult prose of this kind favors direct, readable sentences. The structure resembles contemporary accessible fiction like Beach Read rather than anything demanding.
- Abstraction: 35 out of 100
- The premise is concrete: a boy living in a hospital, serving food, hiding in a supply closet. The grief-stage framing adds some emotional abstraction, but the story stays personal and direct, close to It Ends with Us.
- Information density: 28 out of 100
- A single-protagonist YA story with a manageable cast of nurses and hospital figures. The added 32-page graphic section adds a layer but little density, so it reads lightly like Beach Read.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- Andrew hides from his past and guilt, so readers piece together what happened to his family over time. The superhero Patient F adds some inference, but the storytelling stays mostly direct.
- Symbolic density: 38 out of 100
- The invented superhero Patient F and the hospital as refuge carry clear symbolic weight, and the title's grief stages give a framing device. These are signposted, placing the book near Beach Read and below To Kill a Mockingbird.
- Ironic distance: 25 out of 100
- YA stories of grief and recovery engage sincerely with their protagonist's feelings. Any irony is light, as in It Ends with Us.
- Resolution withholding: 32 out of 100
- The premise of a boy being sought out and forced to face his past points toward emotional resolution, as in typical YA coming-of-age arcs. Some ambiguity about healing remains, but the book leans closed like It Ends with Us.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- A five-stage framework and a 32-page graphic novel section add formal variety. The core narrative stays accessible, more varied than the linear Beach Read but far from experimental.
How The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley is regarded
The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley 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.