The sisters by Cazenove
Published 2016 · 94 pages · 4,000 words · graphic novel, children's fiction, comedy, coming-of-age
How hard is The sisters to read?
The sisters scores 12 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: 14 out of 100
- Dialogue runs to short, everyday words sized for early-elementary readers — playground insults, sibling nicknames ('pestouille'), and exclamations rather than any specialized or archaic vocabulary. It sits well below even a plain-spoken text like Diary of a Young Girl (22), since panel space limits every speech bubble to a handful of simple words.
- Sentence structure: 12 out of 100
- Speech bubbles carry single clauses or sentence fragments built for comic timing, not grammatical elaboration. There is no subordination or nesting to speak of — closer to a comic strip like Asterix than to prose fiction, and simpler than Diary of a Young Girl's (22) diary syntax.
- Abstraction: 15 out of 100
- Every gag is grounded in a concrete, visualized moment — a stolen diary, a bathroom fight, an embarrassing boyfriend encounter. Like Asterix the Gaul (25), the series never drifts into commentary or concept; here the humor is even more purely situational and visual.
- Information density: 12 out of 100
- Gag-a-day comic pacing means each page delivers one clear beat — a setup and a punchline — with the artwork carrying most of the information load. Well below Diary of a Young Girl (22), since there's no accumulating reflection, only discrete comic vignettes.
- Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100
- The comic states its jokes and character motivations directly through dialogue and exaggerated expressions; nothing is left for the reader to infer. Even more direct than Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (25), since visual comedy telegraphs the point on the page.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- There is no motif or allegorical layer — a hidden diary is just a hidden diary, a stuffed animal is just a stuffed animal. This sits below Diary of a Young Girl (18), the lowest anchor for literal, non-symbolic content.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- The strip pokes gentle fun at both sisters' exaggerated reactions — Marine's dramatics, Wendy's teenage self-seriousness — but the humor is affectionate slapstick rather than authorial irony. Slightly above Diary of a Young Girl (15) for its comic exaggeration, well below satire like The Sellout (85).
- Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
- Each strip resolves its own joke by the final panel and the sisters reconcile by the next spread, with no ongoing mystery or cliffhanger. Lower than Beach Read (25), the lightest anchor listed, since even genre-romance closure involves more sustained plot than a gag strip.
- Structural complexity: 14 out of 100
- The book is a sequence of self-contained one-to-two-page vignettes rather than a through-plotted story, with a single consistent point of view split between the two sisters' perspectives on the same events. Simpler than Beach Read's (28) linear romance arc, since there isn't even a continuous plot to track.
How The sisters is regarded
The sisters holds a literary regard score of 20 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.