ABSTRACT
It is increasingly accepted that one can respond to picturebooks in a variety of different ways, however it is only in the last decade or so that some picturebooks are being recognized as extremely complex multimodal texts which often make great intellectual and cognitive demands on the reader. Picturebooks can be very powerful texts; they can stimulate rich discussion and release previously untapped thoughts and emotions allowing the reader to reflect on life and its vagaries. This article asks who is the audience for picturebooks that are challenging, controversial, and unconventional and outlines why it is crucial to read, share, and talk about them collaboratively. It describes how one such book, The Short and Incredibly Happy Life of Riley by Colin Thompson and Amy Lissiat, at first glance a seemingly simple, humorous text, was used with 10 and 11 year old children as the stimulus for some reader response work which quickly led to some profound, indeed, quite philosophical discussions about the purpose of life and the choices that human beings make as they exist in a material world.
