Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell on May 15, 2023
Genres: Fiction / General
Pages: 193
Format: Paperback
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Daniel Woodrell’s modern classic is an unforgettable tale of desperation and courage that inspired the award-winning film starring Jennifer Lawrence.
Winter’s Bone has a Southern Noir feel to it that was hard to get into at first. I went into this knowing very little about this book so it had such a gritty feel to me. But the main mystery is about a girl searching for her drug dealer father.
This one is set in the Ozarks so it has that bleak atmospheric feel. Ree Dolly is sixteen and basically taking care of her two little brothers and her mother by herself. The Dolly family is known to be meth cookers in the area. Ree tries to keep it all together so that she can survive the harsh, cold winter. Her mother isn’t all there in the head, so sixteen year old Ree is her keeper. She finds out her father went to jail and ended up putting up the house as collateral for his bail. Then her father disappeared. So she is on a mission to find her father and save her house. If she looses the house, she won’t be able to keep her family together.
As Ree searches, you can almost feel each pothole she drives though and smell all the grime that she encounters as you go along the journey with her. Woodrell has such a poetic prose that it’s hard to believe you are reading about such bleak things as homelessness and drugs. And the scenes where Ree encounters her female relatives to ask about her father and the awful things these women did to her were tough to read about. The characters were so real and I rooted so hard for Ree. These people were truly Rednecks.
I think the only reason I kept on reading was to find out if she ever found her father and what had happened to him. I know it was hinted at throughout the book, but I was hoping for a different outcome. I was glad Ree had the support of her Uncle. The themes in Winter’s Bone were tough ones to read about. But her persistence and her family were her saving grace. I would recommend this for those who like the gritty, hopeless type stories like Ozark.