Cover2Cover Books was honoured by a visit from prizewinning author Jayne Bauling, who joined us to promote her new book Playmaker. Our partner, FunDza Literacy Trust, cohosted.
Playmaker is the first in a trilogy and is set at a fictional local teen soccer club. Offside, the next in the series, is coming out in October.
“We commissioned this series for a couple of reasons: feedback from FunDza readers showed us that in rural areas particularly, teens struggled with our original series, Harmony High, even though it was written to be easily understood and accessible. And we also saw that we were still getting more girls reading them than boys. So we decided on a simpler, shorter set of novels centred on soccer,” says FunDza’s Dorothy Dyer, who commissioned the book for Cover2Cover.
The main event was at morning assembly at Silikamva High in Hout Bay, where 5 learners had been given advance copies of the book to review.
Sandiseka Xhego and Elie Mabunda gave the series “5 out of 5”, and Witness Kenyama urged Jayne to “keep on doing a good job”. Cassandra Mabasa and Violet Kaluwa found it “easy and fun!”.
During her visit to Cape Town, Jayne and the team from FunDza and Cover2Cover also visited Christel House, which has been a FunDza beneficiary for many years.
We also met up with the Ubuntu Soccer Academy in Fish Hoek. We want to see if young soccer players will get hooked on reading if they are exposed to an exciting story around the beautiful game! We hope that members of the Under 12 team will be starting a reading habit, kicking off by reading Playmaker at the club centre during quiet time.
We look forward to hearing the responses to Playmaker from our readers.