When Annemarie Hilton was just 8 years old she wrote a book about “the life of a 2nd grader.” The book spans one year during which the protagonist “has lots of adventures like stopping a bully and almost cutting her finger off,” describes the author of her work.
One language, however, wouldn’t suffice as a means for this Utah county student to express herself. Annemarie, now 10 and entering the 5th grade is studying Mandarin through Utah’s Dual Language Immersion program. This summer, at the urging of her father – John Hilton III, one of our parent council’s regional vice presidents – Annemarie translated her book in Chinese.
“She has worked really hard on it (60+ hours this summer) and finally finished the editing today. We uploaded it to Amazon and she is now a published author!” said her dad on Wednesday.
Annemarie said she knew some of the words, but had to look up others on Google Translate. “It’s not perfect, but I hope you will like it whether you read it in English or Chinese or both!” she writes in the book’s introduction.
Check it out with your kids. It sells for just $2.99 and Annemarie is donating some of the proceeds to buy Chinese books for her school library. Perhaps it will inspire more budding writers to put their Mandarin to practice.