‘The Adventures of Tim and Chippa’, an entertaining children’s book by local author Paullete McField that takes young readers on a tour across Grand Cayman, is being officially launched this weekend.
“This is still a bit surreal,” she told the Cayman Compass days ahead of the launch hosted by Next Chapter in Camana Bay on Sunday, 23 July.
The single mother of a now-adult daughter has long harboured aspirations of being a writer but for multiple reasons never found the time to put pen to paper until 10 months ago.
“I’ve always known that I wanted to be a writer because numbers just weren’t my friend in school,” she said, jokingly.
One day a friend noted that McField had always said she wanted to write.
“I remember saying, ‘Oh, but I don’t know where to start’, and she told me, ‘Paullete, just write’, so I did.”
Inspiration from grief
When she first started writing the book in October 2022, she said, at first, she thought about using “something that is Caymanian, like a parrot or an iguana, as the main character, and so I wrote the book and it went well, but it just didn’t feel right, it just didn’t feel like my book.”
At that stage, she had already had an agreement with a publisher, and the book was being edited and revised.
”Around that same time, my brother’s death anniversary came and while thinking about him and grieving him, it came to me that this had to be a book that paid homage to his memory, my culture, and the wider Caymanian people,” she said. “I was also able to include my grandmother, who also passed away.”
With her newfound inspiration, McField stopped the presses and went back to the drawing board.
“My brother’s name is Timothy, but people called him Tim-Tim or Chippa, and, just like that, I had the name of the book, ‘The Adventures of Tim and Chippa’,” she said.
‘Touring’ Cayman
In the book, Tim, a young boy, and his sidekick, a parrot named Chippa, embark on an island-wide adventure, from West Bay to East End, stopping at several of Grand Cayman’s tourist attractions – and at times speaking in an easy-to-read Caymanian accent.
“I wanted the book to be true to my roots, my heritage and culture, so it includes scenes with Tim speaking Caymanian,” she said. “And it has been well received.”
In addition to Next Chapter, the Cayman Islands National Museum has ordered copies, and there are discussions on having the books stocked in public libraries and, eventually, in government schools.
“A lady who lives in Cayman and went with her son to visit family back in the UK, sent me pictures of her son reading the book to his friends and family,” McField said. “She told me it’s his favourite book and that he loves to show all his friends things in Cayman. In fact, she has had to order books for her son’s friends as well.”
In light of the positive reviews of the book, McField says she has her eyes set on Little Cayman and Cayman Brac for the next books in the series.
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