Oakville girl, 5, becomes published author with two children’s books

Local girl pens two children’s books

While most children in mid-August are getting ready to go back to school, five-year-old Journee Campbell is helping them prepare in more ways than one.

The Oakville youngster is the author of two books: “The Little Voice in my Head” and her latest work “Save Your Tears Have no Fear.”

“I’m going to help them learn their ABCs,” said Journee. “My school broke down because of the (COVID) virus, I still wanted to help them learn.”

The idea came to Journee’s parents, Jasquand and Abigail Campbell, sometime last year. The family goes back and forth between Oakville and Rochester New York, where Jasquand is from.

The family was stuck south of the border when the pandemic landed in Canada. Journee’s school also closed as a result, forcing her parents to take a more active role in her learning. The materials provided by the school, they felt, were less than adequate.

“We were receiving packages of information from school. We noticed that Journee just wasn’t interested in the information,” Jasquand said.

Journee began doing her own drawings, which her father then turned into a book of flash cards to aid in her learning.

She started telling her teachers in Rochester “I have a book.” This got them curious. “When we went to pick her up one day, [her teachers] were asking, what is this book?,” said Abigail. “And we were like, she wrote a book. The ball started rolling from there to turn it into a proper children’s book.

“The Little Voice in my Head” was released last spring and it seeks to teach children positive self-affirmations. Each letter of the alphabet has its own positive note for readers to say to themselves. “I am awesome” for the letter A. “I am thankful” for T. The letter M gets “I am motivated.”

The book is already in the classrooms of her school in Rochester, the Jesus Loves Us Child Care Centre. “We included the book in our classrooms obviously as a way to support her career and her family, but also to support the social-emotional growth of our students,” the centre’s Dawn Brugger told the Oakville Beaver via email.

“We are big proponents of mental wellness and intentionally teach social emotional skills daily in each of our classrooms; skills like identifying emotions, resolving conflicts and self-regulation strategies,” Brugger added.

The popularity of the books skyrocketed very quickly. No less a figure than Tatyana Ali, known for playing cousin Ashley on TV’s “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” promoted “The Little Voice in my Head.” The book is available at Barnes and Noble in the United States.

The family says they are in talks with Chapters-Indigo to include the book in their stock. They are also working with Halton District School Board and Willowbrae Childcare Academy to include it in their classrooms, too.

But Journee isn’t done yet.

“Save Your Tears, Have no Fears,” preorders for which are now being taken, is a collection of vignettes showing Journee, a character in both books, facing her fears. These include a harrowing encounter with a garden snake and the scary basement of her home. In both situations, she repeated her mantra that she came up with, “save your tears, have no fear.”

The inspiration for the second book came when her parents heard her comforting her little sister. “My youngest is scared to sleep in a room by herself, so we hear (Journee) in there saying ‘save your tears, have no fear, Ellie is here,’” Jasquand said.

Ellie is her stuffed unicorn friend, who also appears in the second book. Journee hopes to have more books out in the future. She thinks the next one could be about “swimming” or “math.”