I can completely relate to your daughter! I always had trouble with getting the pictures in my head "right" for a book I was reading. For example, houses in books tended to all end up with the same layout in my head, and this really bothered me. I worked really hard to try picture them differently. Same problem with historical novels, or anything where I wanted it to "look" right but just couldn't come up with the images. Sometimes it was too much work and I would give up on a book.
Come to think of it, I still have this problem as an adult! I'm a huge Jane Austen fan, but I was only able to read each of the books for the first time after watching one of the movie adaptations. Before that, all I could picture was modern people sitting around in a modern livingroom.
Anyway, back to what it was like for me as a kid: pictures, or at least a cover illustration, really helped, but only if they were good pictures. Bad pictures or the wrong picture on a cover were really upsetting! (Come to think of it, I still get upset when they take classic childrens books from my childhood and slap an awful new cover illustration on them!)
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, this may just be about how your daughter reacts emotionally to the experience of reading, and not any kind of a reading "problem."
