The news that 10 year old Libby Rees will have a book out next month is making headlines for the usual reasons, mostly to do with her youth. But as she tells the Times' Penny Wark, she had a larger agenda in writing a primer for how children of divorce can cope:

when she came up with this extremely grown-up cognitive therapy technique she was 9. That is when she wrote her book, Help, Hope and Happiness, a manual for children like herself who have faced difficulties. It is a short book of 2,200 words, but no less profound for that, and it will be published next month in response to Libby’s observation that there is a gap in the market waiting to be plugged.

“There are lots of stories of children who are unhappy and I’m surprised there aren’t more self-help books for kids. Kids have got quite a lot to deal with,” she suggests.

I can just see publishers anteing up to this bandwagon...especially if they find similarly precocious children to author the books.