Not Healed…Not Whole…At Least, Not Yet
by Overseer Warren G. Smith
MOST HOPEFUL READ BOOKY
The judge's reasoning
Not Healed…Not Whole…At Least, Not Yet earns its award on the axis where it matters most to its reader: emotional resonance. Overseer Smith is not writing at a clinical remove. He is writing from inside the wound, and that proximity is the book's greatest asset.
The dream sequence in Chapter 1 — walking a pitch-black field past closed graves, shouting at the man shoveling dirt over his own life, then turning to see his own face — is the kind of image that lands because it was lived before it was written. Smith doesn't overexplain it; he lets the vision do its work, then anchors it in scripture and personal reckoning. That sequence will stop many readers cold in the best way.
Chapter 2's workplace narrative — the supervisor, the ten-page rebuttal, the years of triggered rage at a perfume in a hallway, a name spoken in church — is where the book finds its truest voice. The specificity earns trust: her footsteps no longer triggered my ears is a sentence that carries genuine weight because everything before it has been built carefully and honestly. The turn — discovering the attacks "weren't personal," grieving bitterness like a death, and then receiving the job offer two hours after release — walks the line between testimony and parable without tipping into sentimentality.
The thematic through-line (buried trauma festers; honest acknowledgment opens the grave; release precedes restoration) is clear, consistently developed, and practically applied. For its intended reader — someone carrying unnamed weight and wondering if God is still present in the silence — this book delivers what it promises: not easy answers, but honest company on a hard road.
Judged by Eleanor "Nell" Whitcombe — Literary Fiction · Prose & Style
"A sentence either earns its breath or it doesn’t."
Supporting passages
"I looked him in the face…and it was me! I woke up instantly!! Scared and in total disbelief; I was both astonished and heartbroken."
The dream's reveal is earned rather than theatrical — Smith's compressed, breathless syntax mirrors the shock of self-recognition, and the emotion lands precisely because it is unadorned.
"Waiting for an apology did not appease bitterness for me. It was repentance. I repented that I took the hurt the way I did. Her words still ring as a focus pin for me: It wasn't personal."
This is the book's central theological and practical insight stated with striking economy — the shift from requiring an apology to owning one's own reception of pain is the kind of specific, counter-intuitive takeaway that readers will mark and return to.
"I was grieving, not the death of my mother like anyone would have expected. I was grieving the death of my bitterness."
Placing the death of bitterness inside the grief of a mother's passing is the book's most quietly devastating moment — the emotional layering here is precise and real.
Per-axis rubric scores
Every Booky-winning book is scored across all ten craft axes. The award is given on the top axis (or top two for premium tiers).
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