“I Liked Reading the Kids’ Stories Best”: Notes from a Kids’ Book Club in Australia

Biography remains a highly popular genre in children’s literature internationally, yet, at least in the Australian context, we know relatively little about how children engage with it. This paper reflects on findings from a small ethnographic observational study of a children’s book club conducted over a two-year period. In the book club, primary-school children living in Adelaide, Australia, read contemporary biographies written for young readers. Their responses to the texts, the individuals they portrayed, and the themes they identified reveal something about how biography resonates with child readers. This study offers both an entrée into and a mandate for exploring the potential benefits of engaging with child readers to better understand their interaction with non-fiction. Despite its conservative reputation and emphasis on “real” lives and histories, biography has the potential to unlock children’s capacity as cultural critics, particularly in their thinking about representations of truth and children’s lives. Children’s reading of biography reveals what they see as important or noteworthy about the genre, which is likely to be different to what adult critics remark on. For instance, children, as critics of biography are especially tuned into the ways that children’s lives are represented. They understand the limits and affordances of the genre quite keenly: that biography is a genre constructed by adults and reflects the values of the time. But the children also see biography’s potential for representing marginal lives as one of its best qualities. Children’s critical reading of biography is often driven by empathy for the subject.