"Call her Bourbon. That's a name that will get her plenty of attention in life. . ." Bourbon Durpree's life begins with little fanfare and no luxuries in Millennium, a small southern town in North Carolina. She spends most of her life in search of something, anything, to make it meaningful in this town where everybody knows everybody else's business. It is a town where any indiscretion fuels the rumor mill. It is a town where, despite the end of legal segregation, blacks and whites rarely interact socially. It is a town that is about to change. Hargett weaves in universal themes of family, history, grief, and growth in one woman's story. Along the way, secrets are revealed, relationships created and destroyed. There is love, loss, and ultimately happiness, which comes "like molasses in the wintertime."