Author Visit

On Wednesday 2nd March we welcomed Suzanne Hemming to Gretton, author of How Frank Helped Hank, an author who writes inspiring and empowering books for children. Other titles of Suzanne's can be found here: https://theachopsbooks.com/

Back in the summer of 2021, Suzanne organised a Crowdfunder with a view to reach £5,000 and gift over 1,000 copies of 'How Frank Helped Hank' into Primary schools up and down the country. We made contact with her during her Crowdfunding and were one of the very lucky schools to receive 7 copies of her book for our libraries across both sites.

Fast forward to March 2022, World Book Week, and we were delighted to invite her in for readings of her book to our Key Stage 2, Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4/5 groups.

The story is all about Frank's dad Hank who has some pretty outdated views and says things like; "man up", "don't cry like a girl", but Frank can see his dad is hurting and teaches him that it is ok to cry.

As you can imagine, it envoked some fantastic conversation amongst our students and staff. Hearing students say 'but it IS ok to cry, everybody can cry' and 'it's really relatable' made Suzanne really pleased. Our learners really embraced the notion that this parents views were incredibly outdated and wrong.

In the afternoon, she also held a Careers talk with some of our KS4/5 group about her journey to becoming an author. Students were really engaged and asked some brilliant questions like, 'what inspired you to become an author', 'what were your favourite books growing up?' and 'how long did it take you to write this book?' Suzanne thoroughly enjoyed her visit round our school, and was enthusiastic in answering everyone's questions.

If you would like to purchase this, or one of Suzanne's other two books please visit her website https://theachopsbooks.com/ for further information.