Book Reviewed by MWSA!
It’s hard to believe my children’s book, “You Are Always With Me”, has already been in print for over a month. The outpouring of support from friends, friends of friends, and even total strangers has been amazing! While the book launch went great, I am taking steps to increase the book’s visibility and get it into the hands of my readers.
I am excited to announce that I have entered the book into the Military Writer’s Society of America’s Review and Awards Contest. The MWSA supports authors who honor our military, and has been a springboard for helping other authors expand their audience and find publishing opportunities.
Check out the review they just posted on their website:
You Are Always With Me by Daniel L. Berry is a little gem of a book, offering in lyrical rhyming couplets and charming illustrations a sort of love letter to a child separated from a parent on deployment. Beginning and ending with the words, “You are always with me,” the poem addresses the variety of emotions the child might feel—such as uncertainty, sadness, guilt, fear, and loneliness—and offers gentle reminders of how thoughts and dreams and letters and phone calls can help those who are physically separated stay emotionally connected. The illustrations by Brian Azhar are warmly appealing. The muted colors—greens, blues, browns, golds—add to the quiet, contemplative quality of the poem. The characters, illustrated as animals instead of humans, are easy for anyone to identify with. The varied physical expressions and gestures of the two main characters—sweet-faced but by no means saccharine-sweet rabbits—convey the emotions named in the text. The book is somewhat limited by the illustrations of the narrator, which limit the parent-figure to a father, and a slightly jarring rhythm caused by the varying numbers of syllables in the couplets (which, however, slow reading could smooth over). All in all, this is a wonderful book to read aloud to a young child separated from a parent. And it’s a book an eager child will undoubtedly memorize and “read” along with, time after time.
Review by Nancy Arbuthnot (June 2020)
The book is in the running for an award to be announced this August. Check out this link to the review, support the other authors on their site — and wish me luck!!