Avi

word craft

blog

Early Review

LoyaltyOne of the curi­ous things about pro­fes­sion­al writ­ing is that you work on a book for a year or more, but since it’s meant for read­ers, you need to wait longer to see what folks think of it. Only then can you gain a sense of what you have—or have not—wrought. That wait can be a fret­ful time. 

The ear­li­est reviews come from those who have those ARCs—Advance Read­er Copies—sent out by the pub­lish­er for reviews, respons­es, a means to gauge pub­lic reac­tions, and no doubt add to mar­ket­ing plans. 

Because of the wide dis­tri­b­u­tion of ARCs, some­times a kind of unof­fi­cial review comes in very ear­ly. While my next book, Loy­al­ty, is not sched­uled to be pub­lished by Clar­i­on until Feb­ru­ary 2022, here is an ear­ly reac­tion to the book from a blog called “Home­school on the range,” some­thing I nev­er heard of before. 

Home­school on the range 

I high­ly rec­om­mend this book as an addi­tion to the his­to­ry shelf of any mid­dle school or homeschool! 

Avi nev­er fails to dis­ap­point as a young adult author, and in this lat­est release, he does a fan­tas­tic job of mak­ing the old new again. Loy­al­ty is a book of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion, told from the per­spec­tive of a teen from a Tory fam­i­ly. His­to­ry is writ­ten by the vic­tors, so it’s not often we have a chil­dren’s book of the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War writ­ten from a Loy­al­ist per­spec­tive, which is one of the things I love most about it.

As the book pro­gress­es, we see him grow and change into a young man, chal­leng­ing his beliefs and ques­tion­ing right from wrong. In the end, his loy­al­ty is tru­ly test­ed in a unique way. Avi also draws par­al­lels from the past to the present in pas­sages such as this: “Pub­lic shame. Boy­cotts. Phys­i­cal vio­lence. You saw that in your for­mer home. The Sons of Loy­al­ty oppose so-called tyran­ny with a tyran­ny all their own.” 

That sigh of relief you hear is from me. 

Stay tuned. Hope­ful­ly, more just as gen­er­ous are to come. (You nev­er know.)

2 thoughts on “Early Review”

  1. “The Sons of Loy­al­ty oppose so-called tyran­ny with a tyran­ny all their own” is a spec­tac­u­lar sentence. 

    Great to hear you are get­ting these pos­i­tive ear­ly reviews, Avi. I have an author bias, to be sure. I love the acces­si­bil­i­ty of your work for my stu­dents and its bal­ance between detail and sto­ry flow. Look­ing for­ward to your Feb­ru­ary 2022 release to help me beat the win­ter blues.

    ~ Karl, Tuck­er­ton E.S.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Recent Posts