Books/Cottonlandia
Novel · Adult & crossover
Cottonlandia
Win Canterbury is sent south for a four-day break at his grandmother’s place. Then his father is indicted, his mother comes apart, and nobody comes to get him.
The story
A privileged Manhattan teenager is sent to spend winter break at his grandmother’s three-thousand-acre cotton place in Mississippi. It is meant to be four days. Then his father is charged by federal prosecutors, his mother stops being able to cope, and the return ticket quietly stops existing.
Stripped of the city and everything that came with it, Win has to learn a rural county from the bottom: manual work, hunting, rough poverty, and a set of Southern conventions nobody bothers to explain to him. What he finds out there is not comfort. It is the first thing he has ever done that was his.
Told in eighty-seven short chapters, it moves fast.
Details
- Publisher
- Independently published
- Audience
- Adult and crossover
- Setting
- The Mississippi Delta, around the turn of the millennium
- Format
- Ebook
Reviews
What they said.
An affecting contemporary tale of self-discovery set against a richly portrayed Deep South backdrop.
Kirkus ReviewsKirkus also singled out the “seamless storytelling” and the pace of the eighty-seven brisk, clipped chapters — along with the details: venison that tastes like the first time you try a lamb chop, a swamp throbbing and pulsing with frogs and insects.
Not for the classroom shelf
Cottonlandia is written for older readers than the middle-grade novels. If you came here from a fifth-grade reading list, start with Alabama Moon.
Alabama Moon →Read next
More from the same water.
Novels for young readers, Southern fiction for grown ones, and nonfiction from the delta.
