By Jill Biden
A young girl gets through her dad's year-long deployment with the help of her whole family, and a nightly line: don't forget, God bless our troops.
Natalie's dad is a soldier, and one year he's sent overseas for a long deployment. The book follows the year through her eyes: the goodbye, the empty chair, the counting of months, the care packages, the moments the whole family leans on each other, and the nightly ritual the title comes from, ending each day by saying 'don't forget, God bless our troops.' Then, at last, the homecoming. It's written by Jill Biden, drawing on her own family, her granddaughter and her son's deployment with the National Guard, so the everyday texture of a real military year is right there on the page. Raúl Colón's warm illustrations carry it.
It shows the whole shape of a deployment year, not one feeling but the long arc of it, the goodbye, the middle stretch, the homecoming, so a child can see that there's a far side to the waiting. And it shows a family and a wider community holding a child up through it, which is a comfort in itself: the message is that your child isn't carrying this alone, and neither are you.