My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris
Published 2017 · 416 pages · 15,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Graphic Novel, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Mystery & Crime
How hard is My Favorite Thing Is Monsters to read?
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters scores 38 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: 22 out of 100
- A child's voice with some art-historical and Holocaust-related vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 18 out of 100
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- Concrete narrative with layers of meaning in the monster imagery.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Every page is visually dense: crosshatching, art reproductions, narrative, and subtext.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- Multiple timelines, an unreliable child narrator, and a mystery structure.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- Monsters as metaphor for queerness, trauma, and evil. Art reproductions carry thematic weight.
- Ironic distance: 20 out of 100
- Karen's innocence creates dramatic irony. The reader sees what she cannot.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- The murder mystery is unresolved in Volume 1. Volume 2 continues the story.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Notebook conceit, multiple timelines, embedded Holocaust narrative, art-historical commentary.
How My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is regarded
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters holds a literary regard score of 54 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.