Beta Reader Reviews
What readers found inside the story.
Ten independent beta readers — memoir enthusiasts, a developmental editor, and a re-entry ministry leader — read A New Beginning in full and shared their honest, unfiltered reactions.
4.0
Average Rating
10
Reader Reviews
100%
Would Recommend
"I didn't expect to stay up past midnight reading this , but I did"
I want to start with what I was not expecting. I picked this up because the premise caught me, a Black man from Detroit who survived foster care, institutions, incarceration, and a long stretch of years going nowhere, who ends up in suburban Atlanta adopting two boys and marrying a woman eighteen years younger than him. I thought I knew what kind of book it was. I was wrong about how much it would get under my skin.
The early chapters about Michael’s mother and father, Corrine scalding William after years of abuse, the children scattered the same week, Michael’s siblings going in different directions never to properly reconvene, are some of the most plainly devastating domestic history I’ve read in a memoir. There’s no dramatizing. No slow-motion camera. Just the facts laid out calmly, and that calm is what makes it hit. You feel the shape of what a family looks like when it simply ceases to exist from one afternoon forward.
The Mr. Thomas Farley chapters are where the book really found me. This was the social worker who fought his own supervisors to get Michael placed at Hawthorne Center, at a cost of hundreds of dollars a day, in an era when Black children from Detroit were more typically shuttled between underfunded foster homes until they aged out. The detail about Mr. Farley ensuring Michael received Sears clothing allowances instead of the Sam’s Cut-Rate budget that court orders often directed Black children toward, that is such a specific, quietly damning detail that I had to put the book down for a second. This man knew the difference between what the system said a child deserved and what that child actually deserved, and he fought for the latter.
Dr. Larry Brendtro appears first at Hawthorne Center as a young therapist who called Michael a ‘little pear-shaped boy’ and teased him in ways that made him feel safe, then reappears years later as the new president of Waker Academy. The moment when Michael, sitting in a school assembly, sees Brendtro walk through the door and blurts to the boys around him ‘I know him, he was my counselor at Hawthorne Center’, that’s genuinely affecting writing. It doesn’t try to be affecting. It just is.
The Gregg adoption arc is handled with real patience. Bethany’s staff watching Michael over months of weekend visits before even suggesting the possibility, then being direct about his background and telling him they’d already factored it in, that institutional trust, earned slowly, is more moving than any dramatic scene could be. And Gregg’s eagerness to give Ernie a tour of United Processing, teasing him about Michael’s ‘girlfriend in the building,’ is one of the most purely joyful passages in the book.
A few honest things I’d flag. The manuscript shifts between first-person and third-person narration for the same events, sometimes mid-section. Michael becomes ‘Michael’ and then ‘I’ and then ‘Michael’ within a few pages about the same period of his life. It’s jarring because it breaks the intimacy, the first-person voice is so much stronger than the biographical third-person, and I kept wishing the whole book lived in the ‘I.’ A line edit pass needs to make a decision and hold it.
Also: the political commentary sections, several of them land inside chapters that are doing intimate emotional work. When we move from Janet’s cancer call to Iran nuclear policy and back again, the gear shift costs the reader something. Those reflections aren’t uninteresting on their own, but they belong in a different space than the father-son scenes and the adoption hearing.
None of that is fatal. The bones of this story are remarkable, and the ending, the gratitude, the slow accumulation of found family, earns everything the preface promises. This is a book that needed to be written and I’m glad it was.
Beta Reader A
Early reader with a strong interest in memoirs, biographies, and inspirational nonfiction.
REVIEW 1 OF 10
"A powerful story with tremendous potential that stayed with me long after I finished reading."
The raw material here is extraordinary. A childhood in Wayne County foster care that took him through a garage fire, Hawthorne Center, five years at Waker Academy where he was one of the only Black children, two decades of drifting and fraud and incarceration, a courtroom moment in Kalamazoo where a judge gave him summary probation and he nearly collapsed from chest pain in custody, then Georgia, sobriety of a different kind, sales, Bethany Children’s Home, Gregg, Ernie, Sheila. That’s a book. That’s genuinely a book.
My issue is craft, and I want to be honest about it because this manuscript deserves a real edit before it reaches a wide readership. The biggest problem is point of view. The preface is written by Gerald Simmons. Then the book opens in third-person about ‘Michael Bennett’ and ‘Michael’ and ‘the Bennetts.’ Then it shifts to first-person, ‘I was about seven years old when the court took custody of me’, then back to third-person, then first-person again, sometimes within the same page. Chapter Two opens ‘Shortly after Halloween 2024, Michael received an important call from Jenna.’ That is biography. A few paragraphs later we’re in ‘my sons, Gregg and Ernie.’ That’s memoir. They’re different contracts with the reader and the manuscript is trying to honor both simultaneously, which ends up honoring neither fully.
The solution is not complicated, but it requires a clear decision: is this Gerald Simmons writing about his own life in his own voice, or is it a third-person biographical portrait of a man named Michael/Michael? The first-person sections, especially the Mr. Farley passages, the Hawthorne Center chapters, the Kalamazoo courtroom, are markedly more alive than the third-person passages covering the same material. I’d make a strong argument for first-person throughout and then do a full pass to resolve every ‘Michael felt’ and ‘Michael recalled’ into ‘I felt’ and ‘I recalled.’
There are also duplicated sections, near-identical passages about Michael’s professional profile and business history appear in at least two places, and several scene descriptions (the office community gathering, the holiday party, Ernie’s initial placement process) are told twice from slightly different angles without the repetition being signaled as intentional. This reads as draft-merging rather than deliberate structure. A manuscript editor needs to do a full pass and flag every duplicated block for a decision: which version stays, which version goes.
On the political commentary: it’s not that the content is wrong or uninteresting. Gerald Simmons is clearly a thoughtful person with well-developed positions, and those positions are part of who he is. But the memoir genre asks that political reflection be filtered through personal experience rather than delivered as editorial. The Iran deal passage lands in the middle of emotionally charged family material and asks the reader to switch modes entirely. I’d either move those sections to a dedicated chapter titled something like ‘How I Think About the World Now’, which would fit perfectly into the ‘creative nonfiction’ frame the preface establishes, or cut them substantially. As-is they stop the story cold.
What I don’t want to get lost in all of this: the story itself. The image of Michael buying a moped with money earned at a hamburger stand in Albion so he could ride to Mr. Thomas’s house on weekends. Dr. Brendtro teasing a scared eleven-year-old until the kid felt safe enough to laugh. Gregg asking Michael out of nowhere ‘Your kind of like her, don’t you?’ and Michael finally admitting it. Ernie arriving with a small backpack and a duffel bag and Gregg immediately trying to show him around like a tour guide. These are the moments a memoir is built from. They’re here. The manuscript needs to trust them more.
Beta Reader B
Experienced beta reader who regularly provides developmental feedback on nonfiction manuscripts.
REVIEW 2 OF 10
"This is exactly the kind of testimony our community needs more of"
I read this in two sittings, which is unusual for me. I lead a re-entry ministry and I’ve heard hundreds of stories of incarceration and rebuilding. Most of them stay surface-level about the inside experience and rush to get to the redemption part. This book does the opposite, and that’s what makes it different.
The Kalamazoo chapter is the clearest depiction of the re-entry trap I have ever read in a memoir: a man released from one sentence with no plan, no home, no family, and too much pride to ask for help or go to a shelter, who slides back into the same patterns not because he is evil but because there is literally no infrastructure between the courtroom door and the street. When the ministry workers came to the jail to pray with him, Michael had already accepted that if prison was the outcome, he’d have to endure it. What changed wasn’t the legal outcome alone, it was the internal decision that came before the judge spoke. ‘Whether he walked out soon or spent many more years locked up, the old life had to end.’ That’s the line. That’s where transformation actually happens, and most memoirs miss it or soften it. This one doesn’t.
The thread connecting the Cobb County chaplain to Don Bainbridge’s Burning Bush ministry to Bethany Children’s Home to Susanna at First Baptist Atlanta to Gregg to Ernie, that is a vision of how a faith community is supposed to work. Each connection flowing from the previous one, each person showing up for Michael in exactly the moment he needed them, and Michael gradually becoming the person who does that for others. By the time Bethany’s staff tells him that his criminal background doesn’t disqualify him, that they’ve been watching how he lives and that matters more, you feel the full weight of everything he’s come through to arrive at that sentence.
I want to note something that readers in adoption and foster circles will immediately recognize: the honesty about Michael’s nervousness before each new child. Before Gregg’s placement, he genuinely questions whether he’s capable. Before Ernie arrives, the same wave of ‘everything already on my plate.’ Don’t let anyone tell you to cut that hesitation. It is the most credible and most important emotional truth in those chapters. Every foster and adoptive parent I know has felt that exact thing, and almost no memoir talks about it. Naming it will mean more to those readers than the triumphant moments.
The Sheila relationship is handled with real maturity. A man who describes himself honestly as a ‘late bloomer’ in relationships, who grew up in an all-boys institution and went through years of instability, being met by a woman with enough patience to see past his awkwardness to what’s actually there, and a twelve-year-old boy who sees it before either of them says it out loud. Gregg asking Michael’ your kind of like her, don’t you’ and pressing until he gets the admission is exactly right. Children in these situations always see more than the adults give them credit for.
The one thing I’d ask the author to consider: Ernie’s language barrier and the moments of frustration between the boys are mentioned but move past quickly. The scene where Ernie switches to Spanish when he’s upset and Gregg gets frustrated, that is a real, textured thing that I would have loved to stay in longer. That tension, and Michael sitting with both boys to help them slow down and understand each other, is as rich as any of the bigger dramatic scenes. Give it more room.
This is a book that belongs on the resource table of every re-entry ministry, foster care organization, and adoptive family support group in the country. I mean that seriously.
Beta Reader C
Avid reader of memoirs and personal growth narratives with an interest in family and life stories.
REVIEW 3 OF 10
"A remarkable life story that I kept recommending before I even finished it"
My daughter-in-law sent me this after I mentioned I was looking for something with real substance to it. I wasn’t sure at first, I tend to prefer novels, but I ended up texting her about it at 10pm on a Tuesday, which should tell you something.
What caught me first was the Detroit chapter. The Bennett family history, Corrine and William, nine children in a blended household, William’s alcoholism and violence escalating over years, the morning everything broke apart, is written without any sentimentality at all, and somehow that makes it more affecting than a more emotional treatment would be. You’re reading the plain facts of how a family of eleven people becomes, in a matter of days, a collection of separate children going in separate directions who will spend the rest of their lives partially estranged. That’s a tragedy, and the book honors it by not dressing it up.
The social worker, Mr. Farley, is one of the most quietly heroic figures I’ve encountered in a memoir. He’s in his seventies when he takes Michael and Billy under his care, nearing retirement, and he’s fighting his supervisors on a regular basis just to get these two boys the same quality of clothing and placement that white children in the same county receive without argument. The detail about him specifically overriding a court order that would have sent Michael to a discount store for his clothing so he could shop at Sears instead, that particular, concrete detail says more about systemic bias than paragraphs of general statement could. And the fact that Michael, decades later, calculates that if Mr. Farley were still alive today he’d be around 138 years old, that’s exactly the kind of lived arithmetic that tells you how present this man still is in the author’s life.
The Waker Academy chapters are full of this kind of thing. Michael is one of three or four Black children in the entire school. He stays nearly five years when most students stay two. He earns pocket money at a hamburger stand in Albion so he can ride a moped to his social worker’s house on weekends because that’s the closest thing he has to family. He later declines an offer by senior staff at the school to adopt him, out of uncertainty, not ingratitude, and carries the weight of that decision for years. These are complicated human details, not the clean arcs of an inspirational story, and the book is better for including them.
I’ll be honest that I got lost a few times with names. There are many people who pass through Michael’s life, the Paxtons, Susanna, Don Bainbridge, the Cobb County chaplain, various ministry contacts, and while each one matters to the story, for a general reader who doesn’t know this world, a few more anchoring sentences when each person is introduced would help. Not biography, just a line or two: who is this person, how did they come to matter, what do they represent in the arc.
I also found the shifts between first-person and third-person a bit disorienting. The book begins with Gerald Simmons addressing the reader directly in the preface, then moves into the story of ‘Michael Bennett’ told from the outside, then shifts back into ‘I’ for some of the most personal passages. I understand there may be reasons for this, protecting certain details, creating some narrative distance, but for a reader like me it raises a question about where the author is standing in relation to his own story. The first-person sections feel warmer and more immediate. I kept wishing the whole book lived there.
What I will say is this: the adoption of Gregg, and then the arrival of Ernie, and then Gregg’s transparent delight in showing Ernie everything, the office, the people, the idea that his father might have a ‘girlfriend in the building’, that is some of the most genuine joy I’ve read in years. You can feel a man who spent most of his life without a real family finally, carefully, building one. That is what the title promises and what the book, at its best, delivers.
Beta Reader D
General nonfiction reader selected to evaluate the manuscript from a broad audience perspective.
REVIEW 4 OF 10
"A Journey That Will Stay With You"
I finished this in three sittings and cried through most of the last one. Michael’s story hit me the way the best faith memoirs do, not because everything works out neatly, but because you can feel how hard-won every good moment is. The early chapters about Wayne County, about Mr. Farley fighting to get him into Hawthorne Center and Waker Academy when the system wasn’t built for a Black child to get that kind of chance, that section alone could be its own book. I had to put my phone down and just sit with it for a minute.
What really got me was watching that same wound show up again decades later, except this time Michael is the one doing the rescuing. Ernie packing his whole life into a backpack and a duffel bag. Gregg proudly giving him the office tour like he’d worked there for years. The courtroom scene with thirty or forty people showing up for Ernie’s adoption hearing, I was openly crying at “Ernest Edward Bennett.” You don’t get a moment like that unless you’ve walked through everything the earlier chapters put you through first. That’s the book working exactly as it should.
I also appreciated that this doesn’t read like a sanitized redemption story. Michael is honest about prison, about running, about the years he wasn’t the man he became. That honesty is what makes the faith parts land instead of feeling like a sermon.
If I’m being picky, some chapters wander into his sales business and current events in a way that pulled me out of the emotional thread, I found myself skimming to get back to the family. But that’s a small thing next to a story this genuinely moving. I’d recommend this to my book club without hesitation, and I already know who I’m buying it for.
Beta Reader E
A longtime reader of inspirational memoirs and stories centered on faith, resilience, and personal transformation. She regularly participates in community book discussions and enjoys books that explore hope and redemption.
REVIEW 5 OF 10
"A Powerful Testament to Family and Second Chances"
I read a lot of testimony-style books for our men’s group, and most of them follow a predictable shape: hard childhood, dark years, one clean turning point, done. This one doesn’t do that, and it’s better for it. The turning point in this book isn’t a single moment, it’s Michael choosing, over and over, across decades, to build the family he never had. Gregg. Ernie. Tanya. Sheila. Even taking in Elaine. Each one is its own small “new beginning,” and by the time you reach the adoption hearing you understand that the title isn’t about one dramatic reversal, it’s about a life made of them.
The material on Mr. Farley is some of the most affecting writing on institutional racism and individual grace I’ve read in this genre, a caseworker fighting his own supervisors just so two Black boys could get the same clothing allowance and the same placements white children got automatically. That deserves a much bigger spotlight than it currently gets; I’d have read a whole chapter on Farley alone.
I’ll be honest that the political commentary chapters (the Iran conflict, the extended reflections on the current president) surprised me and felt like a different book entirely, I don’t think readers picking this up for a faith-and-family story are expecting a current-events op-ed in the middle of it, and it may date the book quickly or alienate readers who’d otherwise love it. I’d gently suggest trimming or moving that material to an afterword. But the heart of this book, a man rebuilding, one adopted child at a time, what was taken from him as a boy, is exactly the kind of story I want to hand to the men in my group. Strongly recommended.
Beta Reader F
An avid nonfiction reader who enjoys memoirs, leadership, and personal growth books. He is particularly drawn to stories of overcoming adversity and rebuilding one’s life.
REVIEW 6 OF 10
"An Authentic Journey from Being Adopted to Adopting"
As an adoptive parent myself, I don’t often see this side of the story told, the parent who was once the child in the system, now standing on the other side of it. That’s what makes this book worth reading. When Michael talks about sitting with Ernie and Gregg and trying to explain what it means to belong to people, “to have people who belonged to you and whom you could call your own”, I felt that in my chest. That’s not something you can write convincingly unless you’ve lived both halves of it.
I also want to say how much I appreciated Tanya’s introduction near the end. The detail about her coming through the same shelter system near Cobb Parkway that Michael had once passed through himself, that quiet echo is the kind of detail a lot of memoirs would miss, and this book caught it. Small moments like that are doing a lot of the emotional work here.
Where this dropped from a five-star read for me is craft, not content. The narration shifts between third person (“Michael thought…”) and first person (“I remember…”) without warning, sometimes within the same page, and it took me out of the story more than once. There’s also a tendency to summarize feelings rather than show them, a lot of “it was a powerful moment” and “everyone was overwhelmed with joy” where I wanted to actually be in the scene with them. I found myself wishing an editor had pushed harder on scene-building in the family chapters, because the material itself is more than strong enough to carry it. Still, I’d give this to any adoptive or foster family I know. The heart of it is real.
Beta Reader G
A frequent reader of family-centered memoirs and human-interest stories. She has a special interest in books about foster care, adoption, and relationships.
REVIEW 7 OF 10
"A Heartfelt Story That Would Benefit from a Tighter Focus"
I went into this without knowing much about the genre, my wife’s group usually does thrillers, so a faith-based family memoir was new territory for me. My honest reaction is mixed, and I think it depends a lot on what a reader is looking for.
The family story is genuinely good. Michael’s childhood is rough to read but never feels exploitative, and once the book gets to Sheila, the boys, and the adoptions, there’s real warmth there. I liked Ernie’s reaction to his adoption news, jumping up and hugging everyone including the dog is the kind of detail that makes a scene feel true rather than performed.
But there’s a lot of the book that reads less like a memoir and more like a personal journal that didn’t get trimmed for a general audience. There are long stretches about merchant services, PaySafe partnerships, summer intern recruiting, HubSpot tracking, and passport logistics for a cruise that don’t move the emotional story forward at all. There’s also a chapter of political commentary about the president and the war with Iran that felt completely disconnected from everything around it, I flipped back twice to make sure I hadn’t skipped to a different book. I understand wanting the memoir to capture “real life,” but not everything that happened to the author needs to be in the finished book.
I also noticed some sensitive material about living relatives, a brother-in-law’s court situation, a niece’s comment about money, family members Michael says blame him for not helping financially, presented in enough detail that it reads more like an unresolved family dispute than something meant for print. That made me a little uncomfortable as an outside reader, wondering if everyone named consented to being in this.
Bottom line: there’s a genuinely moving book in here, probably 60% of the current length. I’d read it again if it were tighter, but as it stands, I’d call it a solid, uneven read, worth it for the family sections, skippable in the business and politics sections.
Beta Reader H
A general nonfiction reader who enjoys memoirs, biographies, and contemporary life stories. He approaches books from the perspective of an everyday reader rather than a genre specialist.
REVIEW 8 OF 10
"A Memoir with Real Heart and Untapped Potential"
Reading this with an editor’s eye rather than a purely emotional one, I can see exactly why this manuscript exists and exactly why it isn’t ready yet. The underlying material, institutional trauma, a caseworker who fought the system for two Black boys, a man who becomes the father he never had by adopting the children the system failed the way it once failed him, is genuinely strong, book-club-worthy material. I don’t doubt for a second this is a true story worth telling.
The problem is execution. The prose leans heavily on bullet-point lists dropped into the middle of narrative scenes (“· They took him shopping for clothes and essentials. · They made sure he had what he needed. · They treated the day as a welcome, not a chore.”) which flattens moments that should be scenes into summary. The POV shifts constantly and without signal between close third person and first-person reflection, sometimes referring to the same person as “Michael” and “I” within a page or two of each other. Phrases like “a new chapter” recur so often they lose meaning by chapter five. And structurally, entire chapters (the merchant-services business updates, the political commentary on the Iran conflict and the current president, the day-to-day intern recruiting logistics) belong in a different book, or at minimum a separate section, because they interrupt the emotional throughline the reader has been following.
None of this is unfixable, it’s a substantive edit, not a rewrite. My honest note to the author would be: trust the family story to carry the book, cut or relocate the business and political tangents, pick one POV and hold it, and turn the bulleted summaries into scenes. There’s a four-star memoir inside a manuscript that currently reads like an unedited personal journal. I’d call this “okay” as it stands, with real potential once it goes through another editorial pass.
Beta Reader I
An experienced beta reader with a strong interest in memoirs and narrative nonfiction. She typically pays close attention to story flow, pacing, and readability while still reading for enjoyment.
REVIEW 9 OF 10
"A Promising Memoir That Needed a Stronger Focus"
Honestly, the cover sold me on a different book than the one I got. “Not shaped by where he came from, but by everything he chose to become”, that’s a great line, and the back cover copy about faith, second chances, and adoption is exactly the story I wanted. When the book is actually telling that story, it delivers. The chapters about Ernie and Gregg being adopted are sincere and moving, and I liked getting to the end and seeing Tanya come into the picture too. That’s a good arc.
But there’s a real disconnect between what’s marketed and what’s inside. I wasn’t expecting detailed passages about payment-processing partnerships, agent recruiting bonuses, and HubSpot lead tracking in the middle of a memoir about family and faith. I also wasn’t expecting a chapter that’s basically a personal op-ed about the president, the Iran conflict, gas prices, and COVID school closures, it reads like it was pulled straight from a journal entry and never revised for the book. It’s fine to have opinions, but it stopped the story cold for me and made we wonder how much of the rest was similarly unfiltered.
The writing itself is readable but plain, a lot of tell-don’t-show (“it was an unforgettable moment,” “everyone was overwhelmed with emotion”) instead of scenes that let me feel it myself. I finished it, and parts of it stuck with me, especially the ending with Ernie’s adoption hearing. But I’d call this an okay read that needed a firmer edit to become the book its own cover is promising. Right now it’s two different books wearing one cover.
Beta Reader J
A casual reader who enjoys inspirational and true-life stories. He is especially interested in books with strong personal journeys and engaging storytelling.
REVIEW 10 OF 10
-End of Beta Reader Reviews, A New Beginning by Gerald H. Simmons-