Selecting texts that can support young readers is essential work for teachers because the 'right' text provides readers with opportunities to demonstrate their skills, strategies and comprehension. Text complexity guides offer teachers one way to select those texts, but despite these pedagogical supports, many readers continue to struggle with learning to read and comprehending texts that are matched to their abilities based on those guides. Using a common reading assessment supported by eye-movement technology, this research examines practices for determining text complexity and how young readers subsequently read and retell the text with the view to better understandings about connections between text complexity and reading. Used in this research was Pinnell and Fountas' (Pinnell, G. S., & Fountas, I. C. (2007). The continuum of literacy learning, grades K-8: Behaviors and understandings to notice, teach, and support. Heinemann) text complexity guide to match a text with different students' reading abilities. Eye movements were then captured as these readers independently read aloud and retold the story. Data analysis revealed readers experienced unanticipated challenges comprehending the text, particularly when encountering pages with inconsistent written and visual information. Findings suggest current approaches for understanding text complexity may not fully consider the unique nature of multimodal texts (such as picturebooks), particularly accounting for relationships between verbal and visual modes. Presented in this paper are implications of these findings for text selection and a proposal for an extended framework for analysing the complexity of a text.