Tara Maher
Travel with your kids to the rebel county’s most iconic landmarks in “Noah’s Cork Adventures”, a new children's book written by Nadine Hughes Campbell.
Nadine, who is originally from Quebec, Canada wrote the book through the eyes of her son, Noah. “I wanted to capture all his adventures, through his eyes. My hope is that in years to come, he can look back at Noah's Cork Adventure and one day read it to his children.” she said. “My main goal was to find a memorable way to document the love my son has for this beautiful city that we're so lucky to call home. He's such a proud Cork boy, and is not afraid to tell people this anytime we leave not just the country, but county. So I wanted to share this love for our city and introduce readers to Cork, with it being the first book of the series.”
At the beginning of the book we meet Noah who spends his day visiting the English Market, Shakey Bridge and Cobh, among other places.
Nadine is passionate that travel possesses many benefits to the children, and this heavily inspired the book. Travel creates play based and nature based learning, it helps boost creativity and imagination, it also instils adaptability and fosters problem solving. A study commissioned by the US travel association – that showed that adults who travelled regularly as children had above average grades, higher educational achievement & higher than average income by 12%. This travel doesn't have to be extravagant, the effect is shown on any travel that's either a min of 80km away or an overnight stay. “With all that being said, I understand that with travel comes a cost, and not all parents have the ability, or means to travel with their children, experiencing this first hand as my parents didn't have the means during my childhood, but I'm so grateful for their sacrifices in order to allow me to be in a position to do this for my son. So to those children who can't get on a flight just yet, I want them to come along for the journey and travel the world and go from county to county in the series of Noah's Adventures. With hopes that one day, they'll be able to visit these places in real life and create an adventure of their own.”
Noah’s Cork Adventure is Nadine’s first piece of published work. “The process was long and to say there was a slight learning curve is an understatement” she admitted. While writing the book, Nadine gave birth to her daughter so had to put the book on hold for a while. “The entire process took just under two years, and I was naïve to think that you just wrote a story and printed it. So much went into it and a lot of mistakes were made and overcome, but the amount of knowledge I gained is invaluable to me now.” Nadine told The Carrigdhoun. She hired an editor who works on children's books to help her navigate reworks and many iterations. “Aside from creating the book, I had to wear a variety of hats, including sales, marketing, administration, bookkeeping, and more, but I'm enjoying it all!” she said.
One of the story’s cutest features is that it is a rhyming book, and this wasn’t accidental, author Nadine revealed, “I love rhyme books, rhyme books are amazing for little ones. The sing song of a rhyme book is great in aiding with memory & cognitive development, literacy development and drives speech and and language. I knew when I started this book, I wanted to have it rhyme. The rhyming was challenging, but so rewarding once I got my head around it and the metre of my story, and it was so touching that night that my son recited a few pages of the book back to me because of the rhyme.”
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