Sister of Silence: A Memoir (Appalachian Families Book 1)

Follow Daleen Berry’s personal journey from coal miner’s wife to teen mom to award-winning journalist to New York Times best-selling author. After a shotgun wedding, Daleen found herself barefoot and pregnant—and by age twenty-one, the mother of four. After realizing she was an abused wife, Daleen became determined to break the silence that shatters women and children's lives. A riveting true story, this memoir demonstrates the astonishing resilience of the human spirit.

In this groundbreaking memoir, Daleen tells how she was raped at thirteen and then married her abuser after becoming pregnant, when her high school was featured on national television for having the highest number of pregnant teens in the U.S. She courageously reveals her own plans to commit murder-suicide—and what stopped her.

Kenneth V. Lanning, a retired FBI special supervisory agent who spent more than twenty years teaching about family violence at Quantico, Va., wrote the foreword for Sister of Silence. He says it's "ultimately a story of survival and hope." Dr. Jacquelyn Campbell, a Johns Hopkins University nursing professor and one of the country's leading family violence researchers, calls Sister of Silence "wonderful!"

Campbell was the first professor to place the book on her syllabus. SOS is being taught at the University of Louisville; Dr. Jean Shimosaki, LCSW, MSW, a Bay Area therapist, is using it with her patients, as it provides “a step-by-step guide for healing.”

In 2006, an excerpt of SOS took first-place in the Appalachian Theme category at the West Virginia Writers’ Competition, and was banned at Livermore High School in California and removed from library shelves as “Banned Book Week 2011” began. It has been featured at “Hope For the Future: Ending Domestic Violence In Families,” hosted by the AIA (UC Berkeley), on The Bob Edwards Show (Sirius XM Radio), and on In A Word, a literary show produced by TV30.

The author is a California native who grew up in Preston and Berkeley counties in West Virginia, and went to work at The Preston County Journal. Among her many awards was one in 1990, when she won a first-place award for investigative journalism. In 1997, she worked for The Dominion Post, covering welfare reform. Among her awards are two second-place honors for her 2007 weekly columns in the Cumberland Times-News, one of which was born from SOS. Berry’s articles about Lashanda Armstrong, the mother who drove her van into the Hudson River in 2011, killing herself and three of her four children, appeared online at The Daily Beast.

This is what a few people are saying about this book and this author:

“Almost never is an interview subject so open or so candid about the most intimate details of the most horrible moments of her life. Daleen is a very brave women and I hope her story will help other girls and women . . . Daleen you are a magnificent storyteller.” —Bob Edwards (Author of Voice in the Box: My Life in Radio)

“In Sister of Silence, author Daleen Berry gently guides us through the dark corridors of her life, so that we can emerge in the light, as she has courageously done, with a sense of hope, authenticity and courage. Sister of Silence is a brave book, written from the heart. It’s a must read for the brave-hearted.” —Asra Q. Nomani (Author of Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam)

“Sister of Silence is authentic, compelling and necessary.” —Richard Currey (Author of Fatal Light)

“For marketing purposes, nothing better can happen to a book than having it banned. A banned book is a sure sign that you’ve done something very right.” —Lee Maynard (Author of Crum)

“A dramatic memoir told in a matter-of-fact, yet strikingly compelling, manner.” —Appalachian Heritage (Summer 2011 Issue)