Winter's Bone: A Novel Kindle Edition

This is a short book, but every single word is perfect. The prose is so exquisitely written by author Daniel Woodrell that it seems poetic. All you have to do is read the words and you will feel the bitter cold, hear the crunch of snow and sense in your very soul the underlying foreboding of the plot. The language, which is rough and profane at times, will utterly transport you to the Ozarks. The people are utterly poor. Meth labs bloom. Men speak with bullets as much as with words. This is a rough, tough place. But the words in the book! They are not only profound, but also elegiac.Ree Dolly is 16 with an adult's worries. Her mama is insane and rocks by the fire muttering inanities. Her much younger brothers depend on her for their very survival. And her daddy has fled to who knows where. Then Ree finds out that her father has placed the rickety old house in which they live as bond. If he doesn't show up for his court date in a week, Ree will lose the house—and that is truly all they have. It's winter in the Ozarks. They will not survive long without the house. So against all odds, Ree goes on a quest to find her daddy. But there is evil out there, and she can feel it in the shadows watching her.This is an absolutely mesmerizing story that fully pulls in the reader to this raw, primitive world, and that is precisely why it is so very, very good.

We have all read books that we didn't want to end, I believe. This was one of those. It is a relatively short book, riveting, very hard to put down (at least for me) and the author obviously has roots in the Ozarks because the language at times is so colloquial that it seems foreign. But--a little like reading Shakespeare--after reading awhile the speech patterns make perfect sense. At the tender age of 16, the character of Ree is astonishing and surprising in her strength and resilience. The life she lives daily has forced her to grow up hard and fast. I have not seen the movie but will definitely see it now. I always prefer to read the book before seeing the movie and will be interested to see how closely the movie follows the book. This is definitely one of those books that make me absolutely love reading.

This was a difficult (because of subject matter) but worthwhile read for me. The dialogue was authentic, as were the hardships and dire circumstances faced by Ree and her family. I cried several times as her desperation intensified and led her into increasingly horrific experiences. She is heroic, but will likely never be looked at as anything more than ‘white trash’ by those outside her community who will never experience anything close to what is reality for so many. And that was heartbreaking to me - that she accomplished an unlikely feat that saves her home, keeps her young siblings out of drug dealing relatives’ homes, her mother out of an institution....and people will always not be able to get past the poverty into which she was born (as evidenced by another reviewer that took issue with the author not going into how ‘these people’ must be on welfare).

I adored this story of Ree Dolly, a 16-year-old who's doing the best she can to save her family's home. Her father has supposedly skipped his court appearance, putting the family home on the line. Ree sets out to either find her father or provide proof to the authorities that her father is dead. Set in the Ozark mountains, Ree's life is difficult, and it shows. She doesn't let poverty get her down; she just accepts it and continues her life.Honestly, the only thing that kept me from giving this novel a 5-star rating was the overuse of poetic language. It just didn't fit for Ree's story. A few poetic phrases here and there would have worked fine, but I found myself wanting to skip ahead of to get back to Ree's story. In other words, the writing got in the way of what the author was trying to say.

I spent a few days last year in the part of Missouri where the book is set, as my husband lived there as a child. One of my husband's boyhood friends and his wife, who are from that area, recently visited us. The wife told me her book club had read Winter's Bone, and it was she who recommended it to me. Woodrell's ear for dialog is wonderful. I love how he can make the speech of semi-educated people sound realistic while making it clear that many of them have an intelligence that enables them to get through situations most college graduates couldn't handle. I don't think it is easy to write in that voice and somehow still have descriptions be so beautiful and accurate. The song "A Country Boy Can Survive" as sung by Hank Williams, Jr., kept running through my head.

Winter's Bone is Homeric, but then what great tale is not Homeric? Heroes in search of themselves like Achilles or other heroes like Odysseus searching to come home. Woodrell's language is Homeric. The descriptive passages and the metaphors and similes are poetic, and they reek of time and place, not the heroic age of bronze, but the rocky vernacular of the Ozarks. This is beautiful story telling and glorious writing.But Woodrell also turns the Odyssey on its head. The very ballsy 17 yr old girl Ree, beset by threats of the loss of her estate owing to her father's absence, mirrors the somewhat immature and effeminate post-pubescent Telemachus of the Odyssey, each desperately needing their wandering father back in their lives. Each need affirmation. Telemachus travels on his own odyssey to get information about the Odysseus from the great Mycenaean kings and potentates who might know something of him, he learns who he is in the end. and meets his father in a reunion as warrior. Ree knows who she is, a Dolly, and she must dodge imperative clan prohibitions to ascertain, first that her father is dead for sure, and then confront his killers, at great risk to herself, to get proof that he is dead to satisfy his bondsmen and regain her material security and establish herself as head of her family, without going to be a warrior. Each figure has a mentor. Telemachus has Mentor who is Athena in disguise. Ree has her uncle Teardrop. Teardrop is a much more powerful figure than Homer's goddess. And we know that he will carry on the vendetta.

I read this novel as part of my MA in creative writing and was enthralled by it. The sense of place, the Ozarks, is so powerfully evoked that, at the end of the book, I felt I had been there. I really cared about the main character, Ree Dolly, a gutsy adolescent girl facing brutal challenges and hardship whilst finding herself responsible for her dysfunctional family. The story has striking contrasts: scenes of high drama juxtaposed with those of tranquillity; horrific subject matter, related in resonant poetic language. The author's unique voice, and the vivid cast of characters against a harsh and unforgiving setting made this a memorable novel for me.

It took me a few pages to get into the vernacular prose, but Daniel Woodrell's lyrical evocation of people and place is extraordinary. It really is a thrilling and beautifully written book, albeit a tough read in places. It seems incredible that the people and communities the story focuses on could be that disenfranchised, and live their lives so differently from their fellow citizens, but it's entirely believable and a reflection and indictment of the times we live in.

This is a very bleak, sparse narrative, following the struggle of a young woman to hold her family (ailing Mum and two young brothers) together against the background of a frighteningly dysfunctional culture, the 'poor whites' of the Ozark region of the US. It is a damning indictment of the current, dominant 'You can have it all' US culture, laying bare the rancid underbelly of the American Dream. The society in which she moves is feral, where it is almost literally a 'dog-eat-dog' struggle for an amazingly basic way of life. Paradoxically, her peers and relatives consider themselves bound by ideas of family loyalty, and the extreme disparity between their fantasy of 'family' and what they actually do to each other is drawn out in excruciating, unsparing detail.There is some hope, in that the main character does succeed in her immediate aim of keeping a roof over her and her family's heads. Yet one is left with a chilling sense of the profound horrors that people will endure, and still continue to exist, day after day, year after year.

Ree Dolly's father has gone missing and she needs to find him before the bail bondsman takes her family home. He's mixed up in some pretty nasty business - his major talent is making drugs - and nobody is saying anything because it is the way of the Ozarks to keep to your own devices.I love stories about way out of the way places in America, those hidden folds, and when they're written with the extraordinariness of Winter's Bone I'm in heaven. American fiction is a funny old thing because it's hard to say what is its defining style. Is it modern, clever writing a la Jonathan Franzen and Don DeLillo, or the solid old time landscape reflecting humanity a la Cormac McCarthy and John Steinbeck? Well it's the latter section that Woodrell falls into. His description of the Ozark mountains is stunning, and the way these cold barren places make cold, dark people is brought vividly to life. His writing thrusts you into that environment of frozen soil and freezing rivers and the story he drops on you is simple and lyrical.The way of life is seen through the eyes of the rough and ready Ree Dolly, a girl of school age who is tasked to look after his mentally ill mother and two young brothers because her father is more often than not absent. She dreams of joining the Army, getting away from her roots, but how can she when there's nobody there to run the homestead? Her character is beautifully rendered, her resilience demonstrated in a series of frightening and awful scenes where she has to deal with unfriendly locals who don't like being asked difficult questions. You really find yourself rooting for her. This book is on a par with the Franzen but in a wholly different way.

Winter's Bone is a powerful tale, exquisitely told. Woodrell expertly immerses the reader in the rural, clannish society of the Ozarks, creating a multi-textured sense of place populated by authentic familial and social relations. And immersion is the right word; one doesn't simply read a description of Ree's world, one is plunged into it, living it with her, experiencing all her anxieties and frustrations. The characterization is excellent and Ree and her close and extended family are full, complex characters which radiate emotional depth and whose interactions and dialogue resonate true. Whilst the story is sombre and bleak, it also has hope, and it quickly hooks the reader in, with the narrative taut and tense, and the prose beautiful and lyrical. Indeed, one of the strengths of Woodrell's writing is that it is so rich and yet so economical. I sense that Winter's Bone is a story that will stay with me for a long time