The experience of acting for the last three years as a judge of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize has alerted me to a general preoccupation with children’s rights which is intensified in newly identified diasporic situations, for instance in the trek between Quebec and Louisiana in D.Y. Béchard’s Vandal Love. This paper will focus on the construction of the child’s consciousness of freedom and entrapment in three novels that centre on negotiation with canonical writers in a diasporic context. Each child comes to a premature recognition of Julia Kristeva’s argument in Strangers to Ourselves, that the foreigner is within us, we are our own foreigners. Lloyd Jones’s protagonist Matilda in Mister Pip finds the courage to withstand a nightmare situation in Papua New Guinea through reading and rewriting the ordeals of Dickens’s Pip. Hisham Matar’s nine-year-old Suleiman’s pleasure in the tales of Scheherazade in In the Country of Men is complicated by his traumatic awareness that his beloved mother is dehumanised by her position as a woman within Libyan politics; his own masculinity induces guilt and leads to acts of betrayal by him and his parents. Rajiv’s involvement with writing and rewriting in The Perfect Man is an attempt to reinvent himself in the American mid-west in the face of rejection of his racial identity and cultural sophistication. The imperial powers exerting authority in these novels are not familiar, and the books’ narrative methods are equally challenging.