De'Shawn Charles Winslow

In West Mills follows an African American community in rural North Carolina across the decades. In fiction, we often imagine stories as journeys, but this novel is about people who've found their home in one place, and in each other. It's a funny, accessible, profound novel, and its author writes about flawed characters and hard times with great tenderness.

Living as a transplant in the South, the past often feels like a foreign country, paved over by economic displacement and the unresolved trauma of Jim Crow. I see glimpses of West Mills in falling-down country stores, in secondhand stories of life before indoor plumbing, in African American high school yearbooks, in the local radio station that—in the year of our lord 2019—broadcast black and white death notices at different times of day.

Against the erosion of memory, this novel is time travel, an act of reclamation. Highly recommended.… (meer)

Jo tries to figure who killed her fiancée's half-siblings before he finds himself in prison. Lymp knows he didn't do it, but he cannot think of anyone who would have had a grudge against them. Secrets come out. Arguments are seen in a different light. But no one believes those who argued with the Harmon siblings could kill them. So, who did it?

I enjoyed this story. The murder was only part of the story. I have to admit, I never saw this one. Good thing I don't make my living as a detective!

The town of West Mills, North Carolina, is very much the focus of the story. You get the history of the town through the eyes of the people who live on the east side of town--how things were, how things are now. You learn of the people of the town. Some come and go a lot. Some stay. Some go and come back to stay regardless of what may happen to them by coming back. The town is as much a character as any of the people. I have a sense that the town is telling the story of this group of people at this time. Next time, the town will tell a story of a different group of people. Things happen and people come and go but the town goes on and will continue to exist and watch the people who reside there for a time.

Now I want to read the first book set in this town, IN WEST MILLS.… (meer)

Ah, we are happily back in West Mills, NC again, and this time (1976), we ride back and forth across the bumpy contrast that is the right and wrong side of the tracks. Jo Wright, born in the small town and pulled to NYC by her mother at twelve, has returned to retire and to marry her old friend and neighbor Lymp (Olympus) Seymore. However, upon her arrival, Lymp's three half-siblings, with whom he does not get along, are all found shot to death in their home. Lymp is an immediate suspect, and Jo need reassurance that he is not the perpetrator and that his rarely seen but fearsome temper did not flare up into brutal violence. Every tongue in this town, Black or white, is wagging about the three victims, who were both mysterious and widely disliked. Drug dealers? Relatives? Racists? The local white police chief has no interest in either dead or live Black people, and Jo takes it on herself to try and clear Lymp. One of the victims, a pediatrician, seemed to have her sister and brother on a tight leash and Jo finds out that she tried to convert a young gay man into being straight by having two teenage boys beat the gay out of him. The incredible gossip line is vividly portrayed, as is the era when being an out gay man was tantamount to being suicidal in a tiny town. Jo's beloved brother in NYC is actually dealing with the same fears, so it's not just the South, it was the times (and still is in many places, and getting worse). The author's fondness for the comfort of a tiny cocoon, along with his deep knowledge of the harm perpetrated by its lack of privacy, make this brilliant sociological mystery sophomore effort almost as fine as his debut novel, In West Mills.… (meer)