Winter's Bone

May 15, 2006
Woodrell flirts with—but doesn't succumb to—cliché in his eighth novel, a luminescent portrait of the poor and desperate South that drafts 16-year-old Ree Dolly, blessed with "abrupt green eyes," as its unlikely heroine. Ree, too young to escape the Ozarks by joining the army, cares for her two younger brothers and mentally ill mother after her methamphetamine-cooking father, Jessup, disappears. Recently arrested on drug charges, Jessup bonded out of jail by using the family home as collateral, but with a court date set in one week's time and Jessup nowhere to be found, Ree has to find him—dead or alive—or the house will be repossessed. At its best, the novel captures the near-religious criminal mania pervasive in rural communities steeped in drug culture. Woodrell's prose, lyrical as often as dialogic, creates an unwieldy but alluring narrative that allows him to draw moments of unexpected tenderness from predictable scripts: from Ree's fearsome, criminal uncle Teardrop, Ree discovers the unshakable strength of family loyalty; from her friend Gail and her woefully dependant siblings, Ree learns that a faith in kinship can blossom in the face of a bleak and flawed existence.

Starred review from May 15, 2006
Sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly has a plan. She's going to join the army as soon as she can free herself from her complicated family obligations. Unfortunately, her father, part of a large extended Dolly family crystal meth enterprise, is missing. Her mother's mind is gone, and two little brothers worship at Ree's feet. Ree gets word that her father has skipped bail; if he doesn't meet his court date, the family loses its home, and there's nowhere to go. Ree begins a journey through the savage poverty of a brutally cold Ozarks winter to deliver her father before his court date. Woodrell's captivatingly resourceful protagonist both enchants and horrifies with her fierce determination to get to the truth of her father's disappearance and to protect her brothers. When she takes on the Dolly family's deep, cancerous control of the meth network, the eruption of violence nearly costs her everything. Woodrell's eighth novel (after "The Death of Sweet Mister") exposes the tragedy of crystal meth in rural America in all its brutal ugliness in language that is both razor sharp and grimly gorgeous. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 4/15/06.]" -Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI"

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2006
Adult/High School -In the poverty-stricken hills of the Ozarks, Rees Dolly, 17, struggles daily to care for her two brothers and an ill mother. When she learns that her absent father, a meth addict, has put up the family home as bond, she embarks on a dangerous search to find him and bring him home for an upcoming court date. Her relatives, many of whom are in the business of -cooking crank, - thwart her at every turn, but her fight to save the family finally succeeds. Rees is by turns tough and tender. She teaches her brothers how to shoot a shotgun, and even box, the way her father had taught her. Her hope is -that these boys would not be dead to wonder by age twelve, dulled to life, empty of kindness, boiling with mean. - A male friend feeds her hallucinogenic mushrooms and then assaults her. But, like Mattie Ross in Charles Portis -s "True Grit" (Penguin, 1995), Rees beats the odds with spunk and courage. In spare but evocative prose, Woodrell depicts a harsh world in which the responsibilities for survival ultimately give Rees meaning and direction. He depicts the landscape, people, and dialects with stunning realism. A compelling testament to how people survive in the worst of circumstances." -Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, Va"

Copyright 2006 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2006
In " Give Us a Kiss" (1996), Woodrell introduced the Redmonds, marijuana farmers from the Ozarks ("It's a strange, powerful bloodline poetry, I guess, but there's something so potent to us Redmonds about bustin' laws together, as a family"). Now he turns his attention to the Redmonds' archenemies, the Dollys, another family of dirt farmers who thrive on bustin' laws together (crank cocaine being their crop of choice). But this time the Dollys aren't feuding with the Redmonds as much as battling each other. Sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly, who dreams of escaping her family by joining the army ("where you got to travel with a gun and they make everybody help keep things clean") is caught in the crossfire when her daddy jumps bail, leaving her stuck with two younger brothers and the prospect of forfeiting their house if the old man doesn't show up for his court date. To find Daddy, dead or alive, and save the house, Ree must ask questions of her notoriously tight-lipped relatives ("talkin' causes witnesses"). When she keeps pushing for answers, the relatives push back. Like his characters, and especially his teen characters, Woodrell's prose mixes tough and tender so thoroughly yet so delicately that we never taste even a hint of false bravado, on the one hand, or sentimentality, on the other. And Ree is one of those heroines whose courage and vulnerability are both irresistible and completely believable--think of not just Mattie Ross in " True " Grit but also Scout in " To Kill a Mockingbird" or even Eliza Naumann in " Bee Season" . One runs out of superlatives to describe Woodrell's fiction. We called his last novel, " The Death of Sweet Mister" (2001), "word perfect." If that's true--and it is--this one is word " perfecter" . (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)