Jack's Reviews > Winter's Bone

Sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly, lives in the Ozark hill country with her father (a meth-cooker), her mother (with Alzheimer's-like symptoms), and her two fairly normal younger brothers. Ree is the family care giver, as her father is frequently gone. Her father has disappeared again as the story opens, which is not unusual. A problem arises when she finds out he has a felony court date in two weeks and he has put their house and timberland up as bond. They will lose everything if he doesn't make the court date.

The saga of her search for her father through the in-bred Ozark valleys both terrorizes and uplifts. Her resourcefulness and improbable maturity endear her to some of the book's baddest and crustiest characters, as well as to "Winter's Bones" readers.

"Bone's" Ozarkified omniscient narrator at first seems contrived and corn-ballish: "houses were perched on the steep hillside like crumbs on a beard." But soon the power of Woodrell's writing and the flow of the story makes this wierd narration fit perfectly: "The Twin Forks River rushed along cold and black but streaked yellow, danced upon brightly by the headlights" and "a fabled man, his face a monument of Ozark stone, with juts and angles and cold shaded parts the sun never touched...His voice held raised hammers and long shadows."

Ree, heroic and persevering, makes one long for a hinted-at additional Ree Dolly book.