ABSTRACT
In David Almond’s My Name Is Mina (2010), the novel’s titular character proposes a set of “extraordinary activities” for the reader to complete. This chapter takes these activities as a starting point to highlight the possibilities and challenges of reader-response research and to explore how readers’ own ages impact the way they engage with children’s literature. Five readers of different ages were asked to complete as many of Mina’s activities as possible. Afterwards, they discussed their completed activities in a semi-structured interview. This chapter analyses the interview data and the completed activities themselves to demonstrate how shame, self-consciousness and spatiality became intertwined with readers’ age during their completion of the extraordinary activities. Adult readers often reflected on their age as the reason why they struggled with some activities. The oldest readers spontaneously used the extraordinary activities as an opportunity to reflect on the invisibility of old age.
