A lot of people picked up little projects during the coronavirus pandemic, like baking or getting really good at Call Of Duty, but Channing Tatum apparently used his break from not making the Gambit movie to spend some time with his seven-year-old daughter. Oh, also, he wrote a children’s book. Hey, it’s not that getting good at Call Of Duty isn’t important, but it does kind of seem like we all could have been doing stuff like that if we applied ourselves… and possessed the evidently raw, boundless talent of Channing Tatum. Handsome bastard.
Tatum’s book is called The One And Only Sparkella, and he announced it in a cute Instagram post about finding his “inner child.” According to the publisher, the book is about a little girl going to school for the first time and getting bullied by the other kids because she really likes to be covered head-to-toe in sparkly things, paints unicorns, and eats peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with sprinkles. Luckily, she happens to have a very kind and supportive dad who teaches her about the importance of being yourself and not worrying about what other people say.
So Channing Tatum, having spent a lot of time with his daughter over the pandemic, wrote a book about a little girl with a good dad. We’re not going to judge an author for doing a bit of self-insert (Stephen King would have approximately zero books if he weren’t allowed to write about horror novelists living in spooky New England towns), we just want him to know that we see what he’s doing. The book—which was illustrated by Kim Barnes, who hopefully got a chance to do some self-insert with the art—will be available next May.