Winter's Bone

“Fading light buttered the ridges until shadows licked them clean and they were lost to nightfall.”

“You got to be ready to die every day - then you got a chance.”

Ree Dolly, a bright and scrappy sixteen year old, living in rural poverty in the Ozarks, with a missing father, an ailing mother and two younger brothers to look after, has just taken on a heap more responsibility- saving the family home.

I first saw the film version of this novel, back in 2010, the same year the book was published. It was my introduction to a terrific young actress named Jennifer Lawrence. I have read several other books by Woodrell but always wanted to read the source material and I finally did. It is excellent. I knew he was a good writer but his show more prose here, absolutely sings. It is tough and lyrical and he captures the hard-scrabble Ozark life with a sharp eye and ear for detail. If you have only seen the film, please give this one your full attention. show less

I loved this book. Despite its short length and readable narrative, Winter’s Bone really packs a punch.

I truly enjoy reading books about the rural South. It’s almost like reading speculative fiction – the Appalachians and the Ozarks read like dystopic wastelands with unfamiliar language, customs, and social mores, sometimes bewildering ones. The devastation wreaked by the extreme poverty of this part of the country is almost unfathomable in its scope. It doesn’t read like it’s America, despite that it’s only a handful of states away. I find that fascinating.

There are two main types of extreme poverty in the United States. One is the urban poverty experienced primarily by people of color, and books about that are show more fascinating and horrifying mostly because of their juxtaposition of that reality with the “rest” of society. They’re powerful in what they say about the rich and poor in close proximity – the Upper East Side and Harlem, glittering high-rises and decrepit row houses, a few dozen blocks apart.

But books about rural Southern poverty, specifically those set deep in the mountains, are different because there is no juxtaposition. There’s no culture to compare it to, no nearby city to gleam in the distance. It isn’t as though they’re looking up at Atlanta and seeing what they can’t have; Atlanta might as well not even exist.

I imagine – though I am not a historian of the region – that these people didn’t start out insular. When you live in the middle of nowhere, untouched and unaffected by all outsiders, needing to be self-sufficient, it’s only natural to turn inward, trusting only your kin. The longer this goes on, the more natural distrust of outsiders becomes. We marginalize them simultaneous to them marginalizing themselves. We don’t save them, or even help them, but I doubt they’d take it, anyway. It’s a completely separate world that feels nothing but disdain and distrust for our own.

In Winter’s Bone, distrust is a given. It never strikes a single character to resolve disputes in any way other than internal, even when faced with the encroachment of the long arm of the law. Ree is the only detective she’ll ever trust. She tries a great number of desperate measures, going to the fringes of her extended family’s empire, yet she doesn’t even want local law enforcement to cross the threshold of her home. And you get it. It’s all perfectly natural. It’s as right as the off-kilter, ungrammatical narration and the word substitutions that I, for one, had to read aloud to understand. It’s context, and the context of the desperate poverty of the Ozarks is perfect here.

Bleak yet fascinating. A great read. show less

The fact that this story, even with all the privileges of a fictional story, wasn't dismissed as ludicrous, makes the Ozarks a place that is so unlike the US we know and yet more American than all other. Family, poverty, archaic yet honest values takes us back to frontier times. Backwards as a place phrase, not a time phrase, and not entirely negative at that, in spite of all the violence it entails.
Incredible, eye-opening book!

I had a very difficult time with this book. It was difficult to read, both because it was written in the Ozark dialect, and also because it was, well, difficult to read. Everything that happens in the book is written so matter-of factly, like it's perfectly normal for a teenaged girl to be beaten by a group of adult women because she's asking too many questions. Even Ree, the teenager, seems to accept this as the way of the world. That being said, it is a very powerful book, more so because I suspect that these things happen daily in that area. I didn't like it, I didn't enjoy it, but I can't call it a "bad book."

Ree Dolly stood at the break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. The carcasses hung pale of flesh with a fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagging limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early bloom of decay might round the flavor, sweeten the meat to the bone.

Snow clouds had replaced the horizon, capped the valley darkly, and chafing wind blew so the hung meat twirled from jigging branches. Ree, brunette and sixteen, with milk skin and abrupt green eyes, stood bare-armed in a show more fluttering yellow dress, face to the wind, her cheeks reddening as if smacked and smacked again. She stood tall in combat boots, scarce at the waist but plenty through the arms and shoulders, a body made for loping after needs.

The opening of Winter's Bone is an odd combination of intriguing and off-putting. Mr. Woodrell has plenty more over-wrought prose, but luckily he gets most of it out of his system in the first half of the book. I still have not deciphered this sentence: Gray nailed down over the sky complete and all the windows. I get it, but I just don't get it.

Underneath all the writerly flufferty, there's a damn good story, though. High school drop out Ree is raising her two younger brothers and caring for her heavily-medicated mother, since her meth-cooking father is never around -- in jail, running drugs, or off with other women. After his latest arrest, he put up the family property as bail collateral and has apparently skipped town. If Ree can't drag him back, her family will be homeless. As she searches, she becomes more convinced that he's dead, but secrets among the Ozark people come at a high price.

I haven't seen the movie adaptation (yet), but I kept picturing Jennifer Lawrence/Katniss as Ree. She really is a great character -- tough, yet tender and vulnerable. I really love her relationship with her little brothers, to whom she's more of a mother than the phantom that they don't remember ever being sane and present. Her childhood friendship with Gail, now a teen mom and wife, is bittersweet and complicated. And her changing relationship with her father's scary older brother Teardrop (so named for the prison tattoos on his disfigured face burned in a meth explosion) is even touching.

I haven't read a ton of this grit-lit, hillbilly noir genre. Winter's Bone is much more intimate and small-scale than Donald Ray Pollock and lacks the humor of my beloved Sweetgirl, but is well worth reading if you want to see a different side of American life.

Update: I watched the film adaptation, which mostly stays true to the book. There were a few changes that annoyed me, like switching the gender of Ree's youngest sibling (although the explanation given in this NPR article is actually kind of cool). Ree's sense of style is definitely tamped down, as are other women's (thinking of Megan's & the sisters' hairstyles in particular). Uncle Teardrop is much less frightening without the half-melted face and Ree's relationship with Gail isn't as intense. Overall, a good movie, especially Jennifer Lawrence's portrayal of Ree. show less

The striking thing about Winter's Bone is how apparent it is that Daniel Woodrell knows the world and the people of the rural Ozark Mountains. The characters and their intertwined family histories make the story ring true in a manner that goes deeper than research alone can achieve.

The intricate relationships that define the culture both hinder and help Ree Dolly as she attempts to find her meth cook father and save her family home.

Woodrell also describes the physical world of the Ozarks in a way that makes it essential to the story. I'll look for more of Woodrell's novels because this one is outstanding.

This is an engrossing, highly atmospheric tale of a 16-year old Ozarks girl searching for her father--or perhaps his corpse--so she can prevent losing the house she, her two brothers, and crazy mother live in, which her father has put up for his bail bond on charges of cooking meth. It is a dark story, with one shocking scene of female-on-female violence, that is a bit murky when it delves into the family's past and some sort of feud that has separated its branches. But Ree Dolly, the protagonist, who as the story begins is dreaming of escaping by joining the Army when she is old enough, shows strength and courage beyond her years. Some of the other characters are enigmas, particularly Ree's Uncle Teardrop, but they are all memorable. show more Winter runs throughout the book, and you might feel you should be sitting outside in a snowbound forest, with snow dropping off branches onto your wool hunter's cap, while you read it. show less