Nikki & Nick are Great Friends to Pick! receives accolades from “The Children’s Bookwatch.”

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - May 10, 2013 - PRLog -- We at Leo Publishing, LLC, are very pleased to announce that our young author, Marina Sergeyeva, is featured in the May 2013 issue of the book review magazine “Children’s Bookwatch,” after she has received a highly positive review from Midwest Book Review for Nikki & Nick are Great Friends to Pick!  Marina’s book was created to be a fun family reading activity for a parent and child, with its delightful illustrations, whimsical poems, and fun facts, including vocabulary that will help the young child learn while enjoying this book.  Author Marina Sergeyeva is a young and talented writer, originally from Ukraine. Now living in the United States, she writes with an instinctive knowledge of how a book can bring a parent and child together, enhancing the experience of the family. According to the author, “. . . . even more intriguing is that rereading and learning poetry helps with retention of memory, and reading rhymes to a child who is trying to grasp the difficult task of perfecting the reading skills will direct the little one onto a path of life-long reading, starting with phoneme awareness. This, along with the facts given in the book and the relaxing artwork, is like giving them disguised vegetables and having them love the stuff. The entire book is great for their young, yet incredibly powerful, mind.” Marina not only wrote all of the poetry and researched all of the factual information in her book, but also created the delightful and colorful pastel illustrations that grace the 32 pages of this book.

This is what is being said about Nikki and Nick are Great Friends to Pick! in the Children’s Bookwatch review:

“Nikki & Nick Are Great Friends to Pick" is a series of illustrated, illuminated poems to be read by parent and child together. Poems' subjects range from the need to cultivate respectful tidiness to unhealthy disputes. Each page has a child's poem and a parent's suggestion and enrichment page with full page illustrations spilling over throughout. Vocabulary is incorporated first into the verse and then into the illustrations, with brief definitions. Charming whimsical pastel illustrations lend a touch of fantasy, while unusual language choices spice up the narrative verse. A poem titled "A-Bun-Done-T Goodies" addresses computer readiness and literacy, for example. Characters Nikki and Nick help open up this strange and inviting world. An example of a witty poem is Detective Duck: "You know what I once noticed/when looking at a masked face of a duck?/ He tried to disguise yet fell flat so hissed./ Then wolf on his beak creaked ajar. (No, no QUACK!)/... But I was painfully kissed. :'(/ (So I guess he won on his luck!)" For an intriguing experience of exploring books and poems together, read "Nikki & Nick Are Great Friends to Pick" with your closest 6 year old.”

As well as appearing in “The Children’s Bookwatch,” the review has been provided also to the Cengage Learning, Gale interactive CD-ROM series “Book Review Index,” published four times a year for academic, corporate, and public library systems and will be archived on the Midwest Book Review Web site for the next five years. We are both pleased and proud that Marina Sergeyeva’s work has received the praise it so rightly deserves.

Nikki & Nick are Great Friends to Pick!: ISBN: 978-0983473541 is available for purchase through Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and other major book retailers and is distributed through Ingram. You can read a sample of Nikki & Nick on the LEO Web site at: http://www.leopublishing.net/ourbooks.htm