Four books lie open on the nightstand. In three of them, the bookmark sits somewhere around page twelve. The fourth has been face down for a month, in chapter two, like a tent somebody forgot to take down.
That pile is information, and it’s more useful than it looks.
Where a book gets abandoned tells you what happened. In the first pages, it’s almost always the cost of getting in, and there’s a documented effect that explains it. Halfway through, it’s usually pace. And if every book gets dropped, every time, the cause lives outside the book.
This is one of ten reasons a child won’t read, seen from the after side.
Where do they stop? That’s the answer
Take a look at the bookmarks in the last three books they started:
| Where it stopped | What it usually means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Pages 1 to 15 | The entry toll: new world, new style | Read that stretch aloud to them |
| First third | The book’s promise arrived too late | Change books, and look at the pace |
| Right in the middle | Pace or length | Shorter books, shorter chapters |
| Near the end | Rarely a problem: they know how it ends | Let it go; they read it |
| All of them, always, anywhere | The cause lives outside the book | Check the other nine reasons |
The surprising row is the second-to-last: stopping near the end is normal. Once the plot has resolved in their head, the book has done its job.
Stopping in the first pages: the entry toll
The first pages of a book are the hardest stretch of that book. It sounds odd, and it has a known explanation from the world of language teaching.
Stephen Krashen calls it “the first few pages effect.” He describes it like this: readers of a new work “often report that they find the first few pages of a new author’s work tough going. After this initial difficulty, the rest of the book goes much easier.” And he names the mechanism: “this is due to the fact that the context, the story, was new, and, in addition, the reader had not adjusted to the author’s style” (Krashen, Language Magazine, 2004).
Where that comes from, so you know. Krashen describes it in intermediate foreign-language students. Here we’re talking about an eight-year-old reading in their own language. The mechanism he names, a new world plus an unfamiliar style, is the same one at work in front of a new author at eight, so the leap is reasonable. It just hasn’t been tested in that group yet.
What to do with it, and it’s the cheapest idea in this whole article: read the first fifteen pages aloud to them. You pay the toll on their behalf. After that, the book runs downhill, and often they carry on without even noticing you’ve stopped. (Reading aloud to them keeps paying off, by the way, far longer than most people think.)
Stopping halfway: the pace
This is the most common case, and the one that has least to do with willpower.
A book loses its reader when too much time goes by without anything happening. In the craft of writing for children, that stretch has a known address: after the problem has been set up and before it starts to resolve. Writers who know it put something there; writers who don’t lose their reader at exactly that spot. To see where those hinges sit, read the parts of a story, explained with an actual story.
From the outside, it’s just as quick to diagnose. Open the book at the bookmark and read two pages: if nothing happens in two pages, you have your answer.
The way out is a different book, chosen more carefully with three things you can measure with the book in your hands: pages, text per page, and how often something happens.
Stopping on all of them, every time
When it happens at any point, with any book, and has for months, the book is innocent.
That’s when to look elsewhere: whether decoding still takes everything they’ve got, so the story never gets a chance to arrive; whether their head hurts when they read; or whether the hour is simply wrong. The other nine causes are in the ten reasons, ordered from the cheapest to rule out to the slowest to change.
The way out that works: the series
If the problem is the entry toll, there’s a way to pay it only once: make the next books belong to the same world.
Krashen calls it narrow reading, and his argument is direct. “Since each writer has favorite expressions and a distinctive style, and each topic has its own vocabulary and discourse, narrow reading provides built-in review.” And on context: “background knowledge is a tremendous facilitator of comprehension… the more one reads in one area, the more one learns about the area, and the easier one finds subsequent reading in the area.”
Translated to an eight-book series: the first one costs, the second costs half, and from the third on, the reader is home. The characters are there, the world is there, the vocabulary comes back around. The only new thing is the plot, which is exactly what they came for. It’s how curiosity grows best: with a familiar place to stand.
The good objection: doesn’t reading the same kind of thing over and over box them in? Krashen answers it: “deep reading in any topic will provide exposure to a tremendous amount of syntax and vocabulary that is used in other topics,” and readers “gradually expand their reading” on their own.
And if what they already finish is a run of graphic novels, that’s narrow reading already working: what they read there carries more rare words per thousand than a children’s novel.
Is it bad to abandon a book?
Abandoning books is what people who read a lot do.
Someone who reads twenty books a year starts thirty. Choosing, trying fifteen pages and putting a book back is part of reading, and it’s a skill worth learning early. The person who finishes absolutely everything they start usually ends up starting very little.
There’s a practical reason to go easy on forcing it, too. In a survey of 1,755 British families, “more than eight in 10 children agree their favourite books –and the ones they are most likely to finish–are the ones they pick out themselves” (Scholastic, UK Kids & Family Reading Report). Marching them through a book they didn’t choose spends what little goodwill there is.
Where to start
This week, check where the bookmark sits in the last book they dropped. If it’s on page twelve, read that stretch aloud tonight and stop right where it gets good. If it’s halfway, go find a shorter one together.
And if it’s always anywhere at all, the book was never the problem: the ten reasons are waiting.
Where these numbers come from
- Krashen, Stephen, “The Case for Narrow Reading,” Language Magazine 3(5), 17–19, 2004. The author describes the first-few-pages effect and narrow reading in the context of foreign language acquisition. Source
- Scholastic, Kids & Family Reading Report 2014, UK edition. A sample of 1,755 parents and children aged 6 to 17, fielded in summer 2015. Source
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