What started as a love for marine life for Pickerington High School North’s Sophia Klein has transformed into a full-fledged enterprise, culminating in a widely adored children’s book, an invite to the Ohioana Book Festival and the carving of one prospective author’s career path.
Even more remarkable, the author and curator of it was just 14 years old when she did it all.
Now 15 and a freshman at North, Klein is working on her next adventure. However, she’s still taking a moment to bask in the impact she and her book, Turtle Tide, have made.
It all began seven years ago when Klein visited her school’s book fair. She picked up a copy of Dolphin Tale 2, the sequel to the popular novel and movie franchise, and became infatuated with the sea and its creatures.
“I realized this was all a real place,” Klein says. “It was a real story.”
Klein and her family took a trip that summer to Florida’s Clearwater Marine Aquarium, the site of the Dolphin Tale franchise. After getting to see the creatures in person, she knew her passion for marine life would stay with her forever. She was so inspired, in fact, that she helped to raise $1,000 for the aquarium in 2019.
Klein presenting the check for the Clearwater Marine Aquarium.
So, when she was assigned a capstone challenge project for her seventh grade English class, marine life was the first thing that came to mind.
“I wanted to do something with animals, but I was also trying to think of what could I do, considering what I already know,” Klein says. “I do a lot of art, so I decided to see, could I actually try writing a children’s book?”
While most students grumble at the thought of a large and time-consuming project, Klein actually breathed a sigh of relief. She says she already had ideas in the back of her mind for a book before her Lakeview Junior High School teacher, Tim Starkey, presented the project’s rubric. Now, she could set one of those ideas in motion.
This year-long project required two months of research, four to five months to create the project and a final 10-minute presentation.
Due to COVID-19, Starkey wasn’t able to see Klein’s final product until much later than planned. He got sneak peaks at her illustrations, but not her writing.
It should come as no surprise that Klein is a student who constantly outdoes herself, Starkey says, so he didn’t have to see the final product to know how special it would be.
“Sophia goes all out with everything she does,” Starkey says. “I mean, she’s just one of those exceptional students that just pushes herself on everything she does, whether it’s just a simple homework assignment or the capstone challenge project.”
When the deadline came, Turtle Tide was ready. Klein says she came up with the title while trying to name her characters.
“I wanted something to obviously be ocean-themed, but also not like a person’s name essentially, and so I liked the name tide,” Klein says. “So then I just figured I’d try and incorporate that into the title, so I figured Turtle Tide was simple enough, but I thought it still sounded nice.”
When Starkey read Turtle Tide, his expectations were not only met but surpassed. Needless to say, Klein and Turtle Tide earned an A.
While the project was the birth of Turtle Tide, it didn’t end there. Klein saw the Ohioana Book Festival was taking applications for featured authors, and when she couldn’t find an age minimum to enter, she applied. She soon received an email inviting her to be its youngest-ever author at the 2021 festival.
“It was really exciting because, by pure coincidence, I never thought of myself as being an author at the time, but I’d actually heard about the festival in 2019,” Klein says.
Klein’s brother, Caleb, was a huge source of inspiration for the book. One of the characters is named after him, and the book was written with his age range in mind, so Klein wanted to come up with an activity that would incorporate Turtle Tide into an elementary school setting.
After talking to Caleb’s teacher, who suggested she do some sort of author presentation for the class, Klein came up with the idea of a virtual book club. She got in touch with teachers in the district and organized nine sessions with five students in each. The club concluded before the end of the school year.
Klein plans to enter the veterinary field someday, but being a full-time author isn’t completely out of the picture, she says. She’s actually in the middle of her next writing venture, and she can see herself writing even more, pending the success of the next project.
For now, though, Klein will continue to relish the moment and see just how much further she can go.
“I definitely think it was really cool I actually did that,” Klein says. “It was just something I never thought I would’ve done, and I think the experience is just amazing to actually get to say, ‘I’ve written a book,’ and all. I realize I can do that. What else can I do?”
Bre Offenberger is an editorial assistant. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
