Becoming Active Readers with Metafictive Children’s Novels: Analysing Responses to The Bad Beginning and The Name of this Book is Secret

Unreliable narrators, multiple perspectives, and lack of a resolution are all experiences children in the twenty-first century increasingly encounter. These traits are present in metafictive children’s texts and are characteristics of the postmodern era. There is a greater need to equip students with skills to interpret, evaluate, and analyse various forms of communication and representation. Metafictive strategies have increasingly been incorporated into children’s books in the past decade. This paper adopts a reader-response perspective to explore the potential of metafictive elements to cultivate active readers. Through a qualitative case study approach, the paper examines the responses of 11-year-olds to two metafictive novels: The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket, and The Name of this Book is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch.