This rough gem was found among my Speed Dating list. Each year I chose a few books that have been sitting on my TBR for years and read around 10%. If I like it I go on, if not, the book goes to the abandoned folder. I’ve added Winter’s Bone 10 years ago, I have no idea why and how so I was curious to see what it was about. This book is set in the Ozark mountains. It is story of a 16 year old girl, Ree, living in extreme poverty. Her mother is crazy and she has to take care of her two younger bro...

Houses above looked caught on the scraggly hillsides like crumbs in a beard and apt to fall as suddenly. They’d been there two or three lifetimes, though, and cascades of snow, mushes of rain, and huffing spring wind had tried to knock them loose and send them tumbling but never did. There were narrow footpaths wending all about the slopes between the trees, along the rock ledges, from house to house, and in better weather Ree thought Hawkfall looked sort of enchanted, if a place could be enc...

An Angry CountryIt’s difficult to imagine what encouraged the first English settlers to re-locate from their lives of drudgery in the Appalachian mountains to precisely the same lives of drudgery a thousand miles distant in the Ozark hills (mountains being a mere conceit). But move they did, with their traditions of inbreeding, moonshine and frontier violence. The Ozarks, strectching over the corners of four US States, is a sort of American Kurdistan, an artificially divided country. The tourist...

I did the unforgivable.I saw the movie prior to reading the book.I know, the shame.The admirable strength of Ree held together not only her family but also this book. "Never. Never ask for what ought to be offered."It might be Jennifer Lawrence, but Ree does remind me of a harder, prouder Katnis. Ree's father posted bail and ran off, leaving her to tend her young brothers and her disconnected mother. The house is in danger and the food is nearly out yet her back is stiff, her jaw is square. She ...

The movie is not without charm, but doesn’t come close to capturing the full scope of the novel’s bleak beauty. Family dynamics, an integral piece of the story, seem only hinted at on film. The movie’s stark, frost-bitten setting is represented only by bare branches and ski caps. In the book, you actually feel the wind chill and every degree below freezing. Most shockingly, the movie doesn’t feature a single fluff of snow.Then there's the prose. No movie in the world can capture the perfection o...

Gets so close to a fourth star it can smell the new paint job. In fact the plot is totally 5 star – the motivations and machinations of all the characters make complete sense and are a real heartbreaker. The main character, 16 year old Ree Dolly, is great. In the movie, which I came across all of 4 years ago, she’s played by none other than Jennifer Lawrence in her first big role, and the movie and Jennifer both knocked me flat on my back then. It’s a must see. If any book was filmed exactly rig...

Reading this book made me realize how sheltered my life has been. To me, Winter's Bone reads just like a nightmarish dystopia. To millions of people, apparently, it's life. Ree Dolly is incredibly tough and hardened by life - much more than you'd expect from a sixteen-year-old girl. "She could be beat with a garden rake and never cry and had proved that twice before Mamaw saw an unsmiling angel pointing from the treetops at dusk and quit the bottle. She would never cry where her tears migh...

I grew up in a rural area with no shortage of poor rednecks so I thought I knew about country poverty, but the people I knew with their decayed farm houses and trailers lived like Donald Trump compared to the backwoods clan of hill folk in this book.Ree Dolly is a 16-year old girl who dropped out of high school to take care of her crazy mother and two younger brothers. She lives in a remote part of the Ozarks where the only job opportunities are in crystal meth production. Ree plans on joining t...

In this crime thriller set in the Ozarks, 16-year-old Ree Dolly goes on a manhunt to locate her meth-cooking father, dead or alive. She needs to find him because he put their house up for collateral with the bailbondsmen, and he's due in court soon. The Ozark atmosphere is convincing, Woodrell's prose is spare and poetic, and--most important of all--Ree Dolly is a great person to get to know. (I half hope--and half dread--that this may be the first in a series. I want to hear more of Ree, but I ...

yes.this is pretty much why i read, to find a book like this amongst all the three-star so-so's. and it wasn't love at first sight (which might make the experience even better; i didn't love winesberg, ohio right out of the gate either) - i had some reservations from the first page, when the poetic quality of the language seemed forced and i wasn't going to deal with 200 pages of: "three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside...", or "Ree, brunette and sixteen, with milk...