Throw In!: Twin Power

“Will you please come back and play for the club Aoife?”. Aidan asks his twin sister this question every week. Twins, Aoife and Aidan Power, along with their four best friends love playing Gaelic football. They spend most evenings after school playing football in the green in their picturesque rural village of “Droichead Beag”. Aoife and Aidan are skilful and fast but when they combine on the same team, “Twin Power” is unleashed and they have an almost telepathic communication on the pitch, leading to some spectacular scores.

But while Aoife loves football, an incident at a match almost two years earlier saw her stop training and playing with her local GAA club, Droichead Beag GAA. Aidan knows what happened, but Aoife refuses to tell her friends. Could it have something to do with their Under 12 counterparts in Gorman GAA, the rival parish team of Droichead Beag, where old rivalries run deep?

And how will Aoife’s refusal to play affect their school team when the children’s teacher Ms. Kelly, herself a former All- Star football player announces an exciting new school’s football competition, “Star Schools GAA”?

Parish rivalries re-surface and threaten to get out of hand as the children of Droichead Beag National School fight tooth and nail to get their hands on the coveted first ever Star Schools Cup.

Lauren O’Neill is an illustrator and graphic designer based in Dublin. Originally from Wexford, she moved to Dublin to study in NCAD and stayed. Her work has appeared across a wide variety of areas from advertising campaigns to storybooks and gallery exhibitions. She has illustrated Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, winning the Children’s Books Ireland Merit Award for Illustration, and Blazing a Trail which won the Children's Book of the Year (senior) Irish Book Award in 2018.

www.laurenipsum.ie