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In West Mills
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Published:
Bloomsbury Publishing 2019
Status:
Available from OverDrive
Description
"A bighearted novel about family, migration, and the unbearable difficulties of love. Here's a cast of characters you won't soon forget." -Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

"Winslow's impressive debut novel introduces readers to both a flawed, fascinating character in fiction and a wonderful new voice in literature."
-Real Simple, Best Books of 2019

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

Winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

Named a Most Anticipated Novel by

TIME MAGAZINE * USA TODAY * ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY * NYLON * SOUTHERN LIVING * THE LOS ANGELES TIMES * ESSENCE * THE MILLIONS * REAL SIMPLE* HUFFINGTON POST * BUZZFEED


Let the people of West Mills say what they will about Azalea "Knot" Centre; they won't keep her from what she loves best: cheap moonshine, nineteenth-century literature, and the company of men. And yet, when motherhood looms, Knot begins to learn that her freedom has come at a high price. Low on money, ostracized from her parents and cut off from her hometown, Knot turns to her neighbor, Otis Lee Loving, in search of some semblance of family and home.
Otis Lee is eager to help. A lifelong fixer, Otis Lee is determined to steer his friends and family away from decisions that will cause them heartache and ridicule. After his failed attempt to help his older sister, who lives a precarious life in the North, Otis Lee discovers a possible path to redemption in the chaos Knot brings to his doorstep. But while he's busy trying to fix Knot's life, Otis Lee finds himself powerless to repair the many troubles within his own family, as the long-buried secrets of his troubled past begin to come to light.
Spanning decades in a rural North Carolina town where a canal acts as the color line, In West Mills is a magnificent, big-hearted small-town story about family, friendship, storytelling, and the redemptive power of love.
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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
06/04/2019
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781635573411
ASIN:
B07RBDR7TN
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

De'Shawn Charles Winslow. (2019). In West Mills. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

De'Shawn Charles Winslow. 2019. In West Mills. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

De'Shawn Charles Winslow, In West Mills. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.

MLA Citation (style guide)

De'Shawn Charles Winslow. In West Mills. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Grouped Work ID:
95e791c9-cdf5-155b-9ce3-cb9e5597e934
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Needs Update?:
No
Date Added:
May 30, 2019 17:02:31
Date Updated:
May 30, 2019 17:02:31
Last Metadata Check:
Mar 24, 2024 12:41:34
Last Metadata Change:
Feb 25, 2024 12:34:51
Last Availability Check:
Mar 24, 2024 12:41:37
Last Availability Change:
Jun 07, 2023 16:22:57
Last Grouped Work Modification Time:
Mar 28, 2024 02:11:39

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      • value: heartache
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      • value: generations
      • value: intimate
      • value: Storytelling
      • value: children
      • value: strong women
      • value: world war
      • value: relatives
      • value: black
      • value: Gay
      • value: novel
      • value: old-fashioned
      • value: redemption
      • value: debut
      • value: Men
      • value: rural
      • value: African American
      • value: passing
      • value: History
      • value: strong woman
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      • value: home
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      • value: 1987
      • value: southern
      • value: hometown
      • value: moving
      • value: community
      • value: White
      • value: strong female character
      • value: freedom
      • value: Literary
      • value: fixer
      • value: magnificent
      • value: ostracized
      • value: redemptive
      • value: Unplanned pregnancy
      • value: strong female protagonist
      • value: troubled past
      • value: first novel
      • value: iowa writers workshop
      • value: New writer
      • value: Deshawn Wilson
      • value: Knot Center
      • value: Otis Less
      • value: Time magazine profile
      • value: west mills
      • value: writer to watch
creators
      • role: Author
      • fileAs: Winslow, De'Shawn Charles
      • bioText: De'Shawn Charles Winslow is the author of In West Mills, a Center for Fiction First Novel Prize winner, an American Book Award recipient, and a Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction winner, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book, Lambda Literary, and Publishing Triangle awards. He was born and raised in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
      • name: De'Shawn Charles Winslow
publishDate
2019-06-04T00:00:00-04:00
isOwnedByCollections
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title
In West Mills
fullDescription
"A bighearted novel about family, migration, and the unbearable difficulties of love. Here's a cast of characters you won't soon forget." -Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

"Winslow's impressive debut novel introduces readers to both a flawed, fascinating character in fiction and a wonderful new voice in literature."
-Real Simple, Best Books of 2019

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

Winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

Named a Most Anticipated Novel by

TIME MAGAZINE * USA TODAY * ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY * NYLON * SOUTHERN LIVING * THE LOS ANGELES TIMES * ESSENCE * THE MILLIONS * REAL SIMPLE* HUFFINGTON POST * BUZZFEED


Let the people of West Mills say what they will about Azalea "Knot" Centre; they won't keep her from what she loves best: cheap moonshine, nineteenth-century literature, and the company of men. And yet, when motherhood looms, Knot begins to learn that her freedom has come at a high price. Low on money, ostracized from her parents and cut off from her hometown, Knot turns to her neighbor, Otis Lee Loving, in search of some semblance of family and home.
Otis Lee is eager to help. A lifelong fixer, Otis Lee is determined to steer his friends and family away from decisions that will cause them heartache and ridicule. After his failed attempt to help his older sister, who lives a precarious life in the North, Otis Lee discovers a possible path to redemption in the chaos Knot brings to his doorstep. But while he's busy trying to fix Knot's life, Otis Lee finds himself powerless to repair the many troubles within his own family, as the long-buried secrets of his troubled past begin to come to light.
Spanning decades in a rural North Carolina town where a canal acts as the color line, In West Mills is a magnificent, big-hearted small-town story about family, friendship, storytelling, and the redemptive power of love.
reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: The New York Times Book Review
      • content: From the first page, Winslow establishes an uncanny authority and profound tone that belie the book's debut status. The precision and charm of his language lure us in and soothe us...He paints a community so tightknit and thorough it becomes easy to forget the people in it don't exist... Much of the story is told through dialogue, rich and truthful conversations among characters reminiscent of those in August Wilson's plays, expressing so much more than what is on the surface.
      • premium: False
      • source: Boston Globe
      • content: Winslow's quietly glorious novel is dedicated "To the reader," and it engages on a level that's appropriately intimate.
      • premium: False
      • source: The Atlanta Journal Constitution
      • content: Winslow pens layers of complexity in a narrative that is surprising and irresistible at every turn... "In West Mills" is a refreshing and arresting book that shines a light on a woman who rebels against society's strict and unforgiving social norms, despite the costs.
      • premium: False
      • source: Rebecca Makkai, author of THE GREAT BELIEVERS
      • content: This novel will grab you first by the ears, and then by the hand, and then by the heart.
      • premium: False
      • source: Real Simple, Best Books of 2019
      • content: Winslow's impressive debut novel introduces readers to both a flawed, fascinating character in fiction and a wonderful new voice in literature.
      • premium: False
      • source: The Philadelphia Tribune
      • content: In West Mills offers a languid, hazy feeling, somewhat like walking barefoot down a dusty Carolina road on a summer's day. It makes you want to linger.
      • premium: False
      • source: Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
      • content: Winslow's stellar debut follows the residents of a black neighborhood in a tiny North Carolina town over the course of several decades . . . Winslow has a finely tuned ear for the way the people of this small town talk, and his unpretentiously poetic prose goes down like a cool drink of water on a hot day.
      • premium: False
      • source: Garth Greenwell, author of WHAT BELONGS TO YOU
      • content: De'Shawn Charles Winslow has a rare and blessed gift for writing characters who live and breathe and struggle and love one another and attain, in their imperfect, human way, a miraculous grace. The scope of this slim novel astonishes me: it encompasses an entire world.
      • premium: False
      • source: Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
      • content: This tender, exuberant, and impressively crafted debut novel spans decades of family upheaval and painful secrets in telling the story of a freethinking black woman in a tightly knit Carolina community. . . in the brave, hard-bitten, but deeply vulnerable Knot, Winslow has created a character as memorable and colorful as any created by Knot's favorite writer, Charles Dickens.
      • premium: False
      • source: BookPage, starred review
      • content: Reminiscent of August Wilson's 10-play cycle marking each decade in 20th-century African-American history, In West Mills telescopes four decades into a densely packed drama. . . What distinguishes West Mill's melodrama from episodic TV, however, is the real-life, unglamorous attitudes of ordinary people. . . . In West Mills exemplifies the timeless adage that it takes a village to raise one another. This is a historical fiction triumph.
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        Starred review from April 1, 2019
        Winslow’s stellar debut follows the residents of a black neighborhood in a tiny North Carolina town over the course of several decades, beginning in 1941 and ending in 1987. At the center of the novel is ornery Azalea, nicknamed Knot. Twenty-six when the novel begins, she has moved to West Mills, where she now teaches in the elementary school, to get away from her middle-class family and to keep her drinking problem a secret from them. She never wants for male companionship, but her two closest friends are men with whom she has no romantic interest. Sweet, stable Otis Lee, who lives next door with beloved, mouthy wife Pep, keeps Knot grounded as she tries to choose between motherhood and independence. Gay bartender Valley, who spends years in D.C. and Europe between stretches in West Mills, provides her with a sense of the world outside. Events in that outside world, including WWII and the civil rights movement, touch lightly on the residents of the town, but most of their attention goes to personal relationships and to holding on to secrets that give them leverage over others. Knot is a wonderful character, with a stubborn commitment to her own desires. Winslow has a finely tuned ear for the way the people of this small town talk, and his unpretentiously poetic prose goes down like a cool drink of water on a hot day. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        Starred review from April 1, 2019
        This tender, exuberant, and impressively crafted debut novel spans decades of family upheaval and painful secrets in telling the story of a freethinking black woman in a tightly knit Carolina community. Someone as widely read and as fiercely committed to moonshine and serial relationships as Azalea "Knot" Centre would fit snugly within the sophisticated confines of a major metropolis, even in the early 1940s when this saga begins. But Knot lives and teaches school in the rural hamlet of West Mills, North Carolina, and is viewed by the locals as (at best) something of a crank, a solitary eccentric gruffly determined to live life her way. Knot is in her 20s when, the same month Pearl Harbor is attacked, she discovers she's pregnant by a man who's left town for the military. As determined as she is to go through this ordeal on her own, especially given her estrangement from her family, Knot is nonetheless besieged by the kindness of her neighbors two doors down, the aptly named Otis Lee Loving and his wife, Penelope (or "Pep," as he calls her), who agree to find a local couple to adopt the child. That's the kind of man Otis Lee is, somebody who arranges and fixes things for others, especially those he's closest to. And in Knot, Otis Lee finds a person who needs his help whether she admits it or not. They forge a lifelong platonic bond that can't be shaken even when Otis Lee has to do the same thing all over again when Knot has another baby by yet another man she's not marrying. Through Winslow's evocative writing and expansive storytelling, the layers of Otis Lee's past life, as troubled and heartbreaking as Knot's, peel away to reveal how hard it has been for him to remain steadfast and strong to those within and outside his immediate family. And in the brave, hard-bitten, but deeply vulnerable Knot, Winslow has created a character as memorable and colorful as any created by Knot's favorite writer, Charles Dickens. Through more than 40 years of ups and downs, Knot and Otis Lee's story makes you feel the enduring grace and potential redemption to be found in even the unlikeliest of extended families. Winslow's heroine isn't easy to like. But over time, she reaches into your heart and touches it deeply. So does this book.

        COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        April 1, 2019
        Beginning in the 1940s and spanning 40 years, Winslow's debut novel shares themes of acceptance and the importance of community through the eyes of a fierce, memorable antiheroine. In the small North Carolina town of West Mills, Azalea Knot Centre is committed to living life on her own terms. She needs nothing?especially not the man she just kicked to the curb?other than her moonshine and Dickens' novels and, later, her neighbors Otis Lee and Pep, who are like family and come to Knot's rescue when she discovers she is pregnant. West Mills may be a small town, but it is chock-full of memorable characters and big, years-spanning secrets. Winslow is a natural storyteller whose writing is like a mash-up of Zora Neale Hurston and Edward Kelsey Moore, and his characters spark to life, especially Knot, who Winslow magically makes both enraging and endearing. Although at times entire years are glossed over in this short novel, its humor and heart will win over many readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

popularity
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      • value: African American Fiction
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shortDescription
"A bighearted novel about family, migration, and the unbearable difficulties of love. Here's a cast of characters you won't soon forget." -Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

"Winslow's impressive debut novel introduces readers to both a flawed, fascinating character in fiction and a wonderful new voice in literature."
-Real Simple, Best Books of 2019

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

Winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

Named a Most Anticipated Novel by

TIME MAGAZINE * USA TODAY * ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY * NYLON * SOUTHERN LIVING * THE LOS ANGELES TIMES * ESSENCE * THE MILLIONS * REAL SIMPLE* HUFFINGTON POST * BUZZFEED


Let the people of West Mills say what they will about Azalea "Knot" Centre; they won't keep her from what she loves best: cheap moonshine, nineteenth-century literature, and the company of men. And...
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