Multilingual Children's Interaction with Metafiction in a Postmodern Picture Book

When teachers and school librarians choose picture books for multilingual children, they often base their choice on an evaluation of linguistic comprehensibility, content familiarity and cultural appropriateness. This means that postmodern picture books may be excluded. This paper presents a case study of multilingual children's encounter with a postmodern picture book with distinct metafictional features. In the page-by-page walkthroughs of the book, many of the multilingual children demonstrate a high level of literary competence. They deal with the book's metafictional features with great confidence and explicitly call for books which challenge them and break with their expectations as readers. Consequently, it is argued that postmodern picture books should be part of the range of books presented to multilingual children.