An Athlone woman has published her own children’s book, Mean Cow, about the importance of sharing.
Nikki Jacobs is an entrepreneur, who does tourism consulting and owns her own coffee business, Little Johnny’s. She attended Vanguard Primary School and Harold Cressy High School and says English was always her favourite subject at school, and she relished getting a new reader, so much so that she would call her grandmother and read the entire book to her over the phone.
This continued throughout primary and high school, and even when she studied French at university, she would go to her parents’ room and read aloud for them even though they did not understand.
Now she’s written her own book, which she hopes will prove just interesting for children as those readers she used to rattle off to her gran.
“It is a rhyming book; it is much easier to write that way and forces you to think in a certain way as it makes you think out of the box,” she says.
The 20-page book, which will sell for R70, is about a selfish cow who doesn’t like sharing and wants all the green grass for herself.
“She is very creative in what she does with the grass. One day, the grass catches alight, and she panics because who will help her as she never wanted to share with anyone. Eventually the cows help her and she ends up sharing with them.”
Nikki wrote the book in a day, but it took two months to illustrate and two years to publish.
The book will be launching on Saturday at the Cape Flats Book Festival at West End Primary School in Mitchell’s Plain.