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.

"No more secrets. The longer they're kept, the more hurt they cause when they're set free."

De'Shawn Charles Winslow blew me away with In West Mills, his debut novel. It has small town, Southern vibes, friendships to envy, family and community secrets and a variety of characters that you will fall in love with. My favorite character was Knot, a strong willed, book lover who lives life on her own terms and doesn't care for anyone else's opinions on her lifestyle. Some of her decisions made me want to shake her but I loved her strength of conviction and how unapologetic she was about her own identity. Underneath her tough exterior she did have a caring heart that allowed for some deep friendships to form and for some redemption to occur. I only wish I knew just a little bit more about her back story.

Winslow knows how to write a multi-layered story that keeps you interested until the very end. The array of characters you meet are fully, fleshed out. Their perspectives are all unique and their original voices add depth to the story. By the end of this novel, I felt like I had a sense of the essence of the town of West Mills. The history woven into the story added context but never made the story feel too heavy. In essence, In West Mills is a breath of fresh air because of the great storytelling.

At the core of the novel is the idea of keeping secrets, especially in small towns. Winslow explores the repercussions of keeping them but leaves room to explore the idea that sometimes secrets protect people.

This novel left me with questions to explore more:

🤫 Who benefits from secret keeping since there is a power dynamic involved?
🤫 Do lies ever really protect someone?
🤫 What drives people to keep secrets when doing so requires so much work?
🤫 Is there something about small towns that force people to keep secrets more?
🤫 How do you decide what secrets are harmful?
🤫 Is a requirement of friendship the ability to keep secrets?
🤫 Does keeping secrets harm or further bond people together?
🤫 How do you decide when secrets should be revealed?

This book was a gem and exactly what I needed to get out of a slump.

Bookdragon rating 4.5 🔥🔥🔥🔥 ( )

This book has an interesting take on black family life in North Carolina over a few generations. The story feels a bit incomplete, though, as if some information is missing. I just felt that most of the characters felt a bit cold and remote. 3.5 stars. ( )

Otis Lee can't help but care about the people around him in his community in North Carolina, and his care extends to his neighbor Azalea "Knot" Centre. Knot is the schoolteacher and she's a good one, but she's also prone to indulging in books, booze and men, but especially the booze. Otis helps her out each time her behavior lands her in trouble, accepting her as she is. In West Mills begins in 1941 and continues through most of the lifespans of Otis, Knot and the various denizens of West Mills], through the changing social conditions, as life in West Mills changes and remains constant, as people leave and return.

This is a novel about secrets, and how they are kept or not kept by an entire community or within families. It's about who has the right or the responsibility to reveal what has been hidden. It's also a deeply nuanced look at a few people in a community over time, how proximity can create deep ties and how the past impacts the present. Otis Lee is a wonderful character whose sense of responsibility is both a strength and a liability. Winslow writes well and with love about his fictitious community and I enjoyed every page I got to spend with Knot, Otis, Pen, Breezy and the rest. ( )

De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s In West Mills is not at all the kind of novel that would usually grab my attention – not even close. But back in the good old days, sometime during March 2020, on my very last visit to a brick and mortar bookstore before virus-hell suddenly broke out all around the world, I spotted a copy on a display table near the store’s front door. Looking now at the book’s front cover, I’m still not sure why I stopped to pick it up, but I’m grateful that I did because this 2019 debut novel has become one of my favorite reads of 2020.

The book’s main character is Azalea Knot Centre, a brand-new schoolteacher who has come to little West Mills, North Carolina, in the early 1940s to school the town’s black children in their separate, but hardly equal, schoolhouse. “Knot,” as she becomes known to the black community, is not a typical starry-eyed young teacher, however. She is most definitely her own woman, and she doesn’t care who knows it or resents her for being it. Oh, Knot enjoys teaching well enough, but her three great loves in life are really good moonshine liquor, men, and 19th century literature (especially Charles Dickens novels), pretty much in that order.

Obviously, two of her three main loves, especially when experienced together, have a tendency to get free-spirited women like Knot into a lot of trouble (hint: Great Expectations is not part of the problem). Knot’s lifestyle did not much lend itself to teaching school in the first place, so when the inevitable finally happens, and she finds herself pregnant, her days in the classroom are destined for an early end. Knot simply cannot see herself as wife-material, much less as someone qualified to raise a child, but she knows she will have to give birth to the baby because, “As scared as Knot was of being someone’s mother, she was more scared of dying on some old woman’s kitchen table, trying to avoid becoming someone’s mother.”

Right now, marriage and motherhood may just be the last two things she wants, or needs, in her life:

“Knowing that she wasn’t ready didn’t mean she liked not being ready. But it felt safe to her – the only kind of safe Knot felt all right with. Safe by not having to worry about hurting a child’s feelings, the way her mother had hurt hers. Safe by not becoming someone’s wife just to figure out, years later, that she didn’t want him. Safe to get a bit of joy from the moonshine – something that couldn’t hurt her or be hurt by her.”

But with a little help from her friends, especially neighbor Otis Lee Loving, Knot Centre creates a nice little life for herself in West Mills, North Carolina. As it turns out, in fact, this woman who spent most of her life living all alone, will have as great an impact on the lives of the citizens of West Mills as most anyone who ever lived there.

Bottom Line: In West Mills may be De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s debut novel, but it certainly doesn’t read much like an author’s first book. The novel spans the years 1941-1987, and it is great fun to watch its colorful cast of characters age and mature over the decades as West Mills itself evolves. There is a lot going on in this one, especially with the complicated relationships that develop between the main characters, but it would be unwise to risk inadvertently revealing a major spoiler or two by saying much more about the plot. This is one you need to experience for yourself in order to get the most out of it. ( )