The Used Parts of Jimbo Winslow (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798234023346)

James "Jimbo" Winslow is the football golden boy of a forgotten Tennessee town in the Appalachian Mountains. But growing up in an abusive home leaves a mark, and his mother's twisted love drives him to a violent act that nearly destroys his future.

A last-minute scholarship pulls him from his hometown just as it threatens to swallow him whole. Leaving comes at a cost, though, as he abandons his high school sweetheart, and when a brutal injury ends his NFL dreams, Jimbo is left untethered.

With his mother's violent warning to never return home, Jimbo drifts to Hollywood, where ambition turns corrosive. Chewed up by the city's underbelly, reduced to selling his body to survive, and ultimately landing in jail, Jimbo loses every illusion he once believed about success, love, and himself.

Spit back out and broken, he finally returns to Tennessee, where his mother's sudden tenderness feels like another cage, and her new husband dredges up memories of his absent father. Jimbo, faced with the demons he's run from his entire life, must decide if he's ready to face the woman he abandoned and the small town that both raised and ruined him.

The Used Parts of Jimbo Winslow is a raw, darkly funny, and devastating coming-of-age novel about what dies in the cracks where love should've grown and the fierce, perilous grace of offering your heart anyway-even when loving someone means cutting loose a piece of yourself and laying it in their hands.

For readers of Demon Copperhead, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream, The Prince of Tides, and Jesus' Son.

Travis Johns is a former Wake Forest University football player whose career-ending injury redirected him toward storytelling. After studying English literature, art, and theatre in London, he built a thirty-year career in Los Angeles as an actor, director, novelist, and screenwriter, with work developed by Academy Award-winning filmmakers and Broadway creatives. He lives in Los Angeles with his family.