What can the affective turn mean for literacy educators who believe their work can lay the foundation for a life filled with meaningful reading pursuits, for students who "become" readers and "do" reading? Because reading occurs across and within an elaborate composite of time, space, relationships, histories, discourses, and materials, the centrality of reader and text is insufficient for understanding affect's power on one's reading activity and reader response. To that end, I introduce Juliana (pseudonym), a first grade student who declared, "I don't want to finish this book!", and with tears welling in her eyes, flung herself face down into a beanbag chair in a corner of the room. I posit that Juliana's response was not just a feeling of unsettlement, but an emotional response to an intricate assemblage of socio-cultural-historical practices and identities, and to the human-nonhuman exchanges around reading in school. I therefore seek to complicate the role of affect in Juliana's declaration toward a posthumanist perspective of emotion, reading identity, and reader response.