The students at Carbon High know their teacher and coach, Cami Carlson, very well, but until this week, many of them did not know that Carlson recently became a published children’s book writer.
Carlson shared her new book, “Hey! You’re Great!” with a large crowd gathered at the Price City Public Library yesterday. The book shares the story of a young girl who struggles to be like other more popular girls, until at last, she realizes that she is great, just the way she is.
Though Carlson hopes to write more, her purpose in writing this book was to get the story’s message across. “It’s a personal story to me,” she revealed. ” I wanted to get the message out.”
The story mirrors Carlson’s own struggles as a young girl to fit the mold of what she believed she needed to look like. She shared that as a young girl, the boy she was “going out with” broke up with her because he said his friends told him that she “could beat him up.”
This led Carlson to try to fit the “cutesy” mold she believed she needed to fill in order to fit in. “I tried to pull that off for like a week, and I just couldn’t do it,” she shared. “It just wasn’t who I was, and so it gave me the idea of not trying to be someone else to fit in with the crowd, just to be who you are.”
The new book is published through Tate Publishing, and is available on their website at https://www.tatepublishing.com/bookstore/book.php?w=978-1-61739-927-5.