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On Thursday and Friday, former Governor Nathan Deal dropped by LaGrange to help promote his new children’s book, Veto, The Governor’s Cat.

Deal said he was asked to write the book by his late wife, Sandra, who had devoted much of her time while he was in office to child literacy and reading to children.

“We estimate she read to about a quarter of a million students in every county, every school system, and over 1000 individual classrooms in Georgia,” Deal said.

“When we got out of office, she was still getting requests to come and read, and she told me, she said I’ve read all the good books that I have. I want you to write me one,” he said.

Deal agreed to write the book, but like many of us, he put it off, thinking he had plenty of time. Then, they got the cancer diagnosis.

“Unfortunately, we got the brain cancer diagnosis, and I hadn’t done anything. So I got started. I wrote the book in its original form and got to read it to her. She liked it, and so she gave me the thumbs up, and that was the inspiration for it,” Deal said.

Deal read portions of the book during a moderated chat hosted by the Friends of the Library at the LaGrange Memorial Library on Thursday evening. Afterward, he signed copies of the book for those who purchased them.

All funds from the book sale go to support youth literacy efforts in Sandra’s memory, he said.

The next morning, Gov. Deal visited Clearview Elementary School and Hogansville Elementary to read the new book to students.

The book covers the heartwarming adventures of Veto and Bill, two rescue cats owned by the first couple.

“The book has a lot of educational aspects to it,” Deal said. “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all. That’s a quotation from Aristotle. I think what my book is trying to do is to do both of those: educate the mind and try to teach children how to read and pronounce words, but also to teach some moral lessons that are included in the book.”

“Sometimes, I think children will listen to messages through an animal more so than they may listen to those same messages from their parents or from their teachers,” he said.

The book is targeted at children around the age of second or third grade. Third-grade literacy is an important metric for measuring how well schools are doing, he said.

“You can predict how many prison beds you’re going to have to build based on third-grade reading scores,” Deal said.