Reviews with content warning for Racial slurs - Decent People

This is certainly written well and with a measured and surefooted voice! I enjoyed the multiple points of view and the gentle way all the stories came together. DECENT PEOPLE read like a contemporary-voiced version of a historical fiction book I might have read in school during an important unit on racism in the United States. I appreciated this read, and I enjoyed it, particularly in a vacuum. However, I just didn’t find this story daring at all considering its 2023 publication date. Perhaps I’ve just read a decent amount of literature of this sort given the college courses I took towards my English lit degree, but this story didn’t seem to illuminate to me anything new about the experience of being Black or gay in the South in the 1970s that I hadn’t already read in other (often contemporaneous and therefore more feeling) accounts and fictions and poems. And given DECENT PEOPLE’s pub year, I would have hoped for more boldness somehow: a story that explicitly criticizes the mistreatment of gay and Black people isn’t exactly daring or revolutionary in 2023. All in all, the ideas in this book felt rather safe and familiar, and I would have liked a splash of the genuinely shocking, the bold, or the innovative.

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beautynbks's review

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challenging mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

This was my first De'Shawn Charles Winslow novel. I checked his first book out from the library but never got to it but that will be changing.

I'm usually not a fan of historical fiction but Decent People was superbly written. The deaths of three of the towns Black residents had the town reeling. Everyone had something to say about Marian, Marva and their brother Lazarus Harmon being murdered. Decent People was set in 1976, West Mills, North Carolina but the issues the residents faced could have easily been 2023.

Ms. Jo Wright was not for the foolishness! Her man Olympus "Lymp" Seymore was accused of killing the Harmons, his half siblings. The police were not in a hurry to solve this crime or nor did they really care. What a shocker. Jo set out to clear Lymp's name and uncovered many secrets the town's people were hiding. I loved Jo because she was ahead of her time. She was a retiree and made it a point to correct people who had an issue with homosexuals and police injustice.

The townspeople of West Mills were definitely small minded and set in their ways. The other characters such as Savannah, with the biracial children who moved back to West Mills, Eunice and her husband Breezy and their shame about their son being gay. I couldn't get enough of these juicy characters. I kept thinking this book can't possibly be set in 1976! I was completely invested in finding out who killed the Harmons for sure. I still feel like there were a lot of secrets that weren't addressed adequately. Some were uncovered and others weren't and had more questions than answers. This was a great Sunday afternoon read.

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evanf's review against another edition

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reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

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