As a member of the Facebook group of 1,500 SLP authors, I often come across books that hit me. Georgia’s Far-Away Family hit home with me as I spent 10 years in England and Norway when my daughters were young.
For those of you with young children on your caseload in similar circumstances or, if your children are in circumstances, I highly recommend Georgia’s Far-Away Family. It can be purchased in English or in French. I asked the author if she would provide us with the why and how of how her story came about. She was gracious to give me her story behind her book below.
“When I was a little girl, I moved around a lot thanks to my father’s job (Irish foreign service). I loved being in exotic places, switching schools never bothered me and I still feel it was a wonderful way to grow up. I learned about the world and its different cultures and people. The only problem was that I didn’t see my extended family that much when we were posted outside of Ireland.
Now I am an SLT. I trained at home in Dublin, but as soon as I graduated I left Ireland to take up a post in a large teaching hospital in Singapore. I went for 2 years and stayed for 10. Back then I spoke only one language but thanks to that start I have spent my entire career treating bilingual children.
As I grew up, I continued to move around and I married a man from a different country. After moving around together we finally settled in France. And now I have a bilingual household too!
I have always written; poetry, essays, the starts of novels I knew I would never finish. So when I had children, I started writing for them. I wrote stories, read them to my three little girls and then put them away. Until I wrote a story about a girl called Georgia and read it to my two elder children. My eldest said, “Hey, that girl is just like us!”. She was right. Georgia’s Far-Away Family is about a little girl who doesn’t live in the same place as her extended family, like me when I was young, and like my own children now. It struck me that in our increasingly global world, what was unusual when I was a child is now very common. Third culture children, multilingual families and people that move from place to place are EVERYWHERE.
So, I decided to work on getting Georgia’s Far-Away Family out into the world. I also decided that since we are a bilingual family and we live in France, I should do it in two languages. The French title is ‘Georgia et sa Famille Autour du Monde’.
Publishing ‘internationally’ was another challenge. French law is very strict when it comes to what is published for children and writing the translation was, for me, the most stressful part. It was so important to me not to dumb down the text so I love the way the French encourage quite complex vocabulary and sentence structures in literature for children.
I am so proud of all that the book represents to me, my children, and to the millions of children living in different places. Many parents who have read the book tell me their children really identify with Georgia and her family and that is worth its weight in gold! Finally, I know lots of people whose children might have language delay or disorder have used my book to start conversations about family not being right next door, to talk about moving and to provide representation. It’s also been used to start conversations about being bilingual or bicultual as, even though they are not directly covered, the book is a great jumping off point for those subjects too!”
Georgia’s Far-Away Place Book Review