Departing from the premise of ‘death of the author’, this contribution aims to study children’s active participation in the reconstruction and re-appropriation of old and arguably outdated children’s book from 1940’s. The study centered around forty Year 3 students in Southern Sweden who read Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, a book first published in 1947, together with their teachers and a librarian. In a process resembling Gunilla Lindqvist’s “Playworld”, both children and adults work together to create a more modern iteration of the book. While the librarian provided numerous paraphrases and elaboration to facilitate students’ meaning making of the book, the students were also encouraged to contribute with their own personal experience and intertextual references from their surroundings. This join negotiation resulted in a collective repository from which the students could draw upon in their reimagination of the book through writing letters to the main protagonist. The result of the analysis also highlights how the reading aloud of the book resulted in a sanitized version, which respect to for example representation of gender, which diminished the potentials for a critical and contextual understanding of the book. Implications for engaging children in the reading of older books in ways which treats them as readers and makers in their own right are discussed.