BURRILLVILLE – Three local Girl Scouts have published children’s books highlighting their unique personal challenges after working with a Burrillville-based publisher and will earn Silver Awards, the highest award a Girl Scout Cadet can attain, for their work, said Troop Leader Angela Knapp-Levesque.
The girls and their families displayed their books and links to the Amazon page where their publications are available for order on Saturday at a book fair celebrating women’s voices in writing organized by the T. Fielding-Lowe Company of Burrillville.
The idea for writing the books started with a birthday party for Knapp-Levesque’s daughter, Eliza Levesque, 13, which involved Thea Fielding-Lowe, the owner of the publishing company.
“It all started with a writing group we did for my daughter’s birthday party,” Knapp-Levesque said. “The girls were experiencing a lot of miseducation and bullying. They decided to use the pain and their passion for writing to educate about their differences. And then Thea said, ‘Let’s publish them on Amazon.’”
“We had such a good time at the writing party that when they were working on their badges they reached out to me for help,” Fielding-Lowe said. “They had the idea and I’d help them when they got stuck. I also did some proofreading and editing and gave them tips.”
Fielding-Lowe also showed them how to use AI to illustrate the books, and now all three are available on Amazon, she said.
“The girls spent 50 hours on each book, 30 of them with Thea,” Knapp-Levesque said. “They had to do research, talk to experts. The books are inspired by how they are different. They are not an education about their difference, but a story about what its like to be different.”
Eliza Levesque’s book, “The Panther With the Lions,” is “an allegory for autism,” Levesque said.
“The panther is adopted by lions, but the panther is less social and just wants to be quiet, while everyone around is more loud,” she said.
Levesque said she was only diagnosed relatively recently with autism herself.
“For years I did not know I had autism. I never really understood other children,” she said. “Writing the book made me feel so good. Middle school students often think of autistic people as lesser people. This book is for children to understand it in a fun story, and then maybe it will make more of an impact.”
Makayla Alger, 14, a freshman at Burrillville High School, wrote her book, “The Way I See It,” based on her own experience of being legally blind, she said.
“It’s about a fox, Elena, who is blind and deaf, and it follows her walking through the forest and teaching woodland creatures about her differences,” Alger said. “She carries a white cane and has hearing aids.”
She said she feels proud that she was able to tell a story about someone like her, a story which is “so rare.”
“It felt really good to be able to tell people about things they don’t really think about,” she said. “Like about the stereotypes people think of us, they always think we’re completely deaf or blind when many of us have different degrees of sight. I’m really proud. I love it.”
A Braille copy of the book was available to peruse at the book fair, and Alger and her mother said they hope to one day have Braille copies available.
Ofelia Cantoral, 12, who attends Burrillville Middle School, said she wrote her book “Oliver” to help children understand anxiety.
“It’s about a husky named Oliver who is anxious so he chews slippers and his owner tells him he’s a bad dog. So he thinks, ‘am I a bad dog?’ and his anxiety gets worse. He is supposed to perform tricks at a talent show but he doesn’t think he can. But he perseveres because everyone tells him he’s got this,” she said.
Cantoral said her own experiences directly inspired the story of Oliver.
“I have really bad anxiety, and it’s hard for me to talk to others and perform, like putting myself out there,” she said. “But with the help of my friends and family I can.”
She also found the writing process challenging, but said she’s happy with the end result.
“I also have ADHD so it was hard to focus on things without pushing hard, but I persevered,” she said. “It was really interesting. I was excited. I’m happy and I think I want to do a Spanish version because I’m part Spanish.”
Fielding-Lowe said she was glad the girls were happy with their end results.
“I worked in non-profits for 20-25 years doing youth programming, so I love working with kids. We just had so much fun,” she said.
Fielding-Lowe started her “traditional publishing company” during Covid, she said.
“I wrote my first book and I thought, ‘I’m going to learn everything I can about the industry so I can do it myself.’ I’m 35 books in now,” she said. “Any time I get a spark I act on it.”
Her book fair, “Women Sharing Their Stories,” was the second she has organized, she said.
“Last year I had seven authors. This year it’s 25 authors,” she said.
Her “ultimate goal” is to open her own book store this summer, she said, with a focus on self-published authors, like the Girl Scouts that she mentored.
Alger’s and Cantoral’s books can be purchased via the links in the titles above, while Levesque’s will be coming soon on Amazon, and readers can watch for it there.
So proud of these young women!