Just ahead of the release of a new story, authors can expect reviews to start trickling in. There are ARCs (advanced reader copies) along with services like NetGalley providing early readers and reviewers with access.

It’s nerve-wracking.

No matter how confident I am when I submit those final edits, I always begin to wonder . . . is it really any good? Will readers like it? Did I get the idea across??

Thank goodness for Rachel McMillan! Rachel is an author, agent, and avid reader. I’m pretty sure one of her top callings is encourager-of-authors. And she posted the very first review of The Right Kind of Fool yesterday.

A gorgeous tapestry of words and a cadence recalling Delia Owens, Chris Fabry, and Charles Martin inform this character driven piece set in 1930s Appalachia. When a deaf teenager finds a dead body he is unexpectedly reunited with the father who abandoned him and his mother long ago. And as family is reforged so are the secrets of a small community exhumed.

More than just a mystery, though the shooting (inspired by a historic one) definitely has many tenets to untangle, this is a book of quiet wisdom and of love: a couple reunited, a father learning to love his son through his fears of inadequacy, and a love for the still, beautiful land of the ridges and mountains, customs and quirks of small-town West Virginia.

While Loyal and his mother Delphy are lovingly dimensional, this is Creed’s story. It takes a talented pen to weave in the compassion needed for this man whose selfish actions in the name of protection drove him away. As it takes the same gift to sew in the grace that Loyal shows his father again and again. In a quiet look, in an exchanged hug, in the slow but sure way that Creed begins to learn his son’s new language

Expertly researched, skilled and soft, The Right Kind of Fool winnowed into places this reader hadn’t known she wanted to discover and unravel. And like the best kind of books, I will live with these characters now and wonder about them and how their worlds go on and on without me now that I’ve closed the chapter I was allotted to see of their lives.

Thanks, Rachel. I think I can relax a bit now!

P.S. Check out Rachel’s latest release, London Restoration!