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Daniel Woodrell

Winter's Bone Library Binding – October 23, 2008

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English
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October 23, 2008
ISBN-10

1439559058
ISBN-13

978-1439559055
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Publisher; Reprint edition (October 23, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1439559058
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1439559055
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.6 ounces

Best Sellers Rank: #3,078,020 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #36,032 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction

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4.2 3,247 ratings

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Daniel Woodrell

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Daniel Woodrell (born March 4, 1953) is an American writer of fiction. He has written eight novels, most of them set in the Missouri Ozarks. Woodrell coined the phrase "country noir" to describe his 1996 novel Give Us a Kiss. Reviewers have frequently since used the term to categorize his writing.

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Michael Seitz

Beautiful Prose Carries the Story

Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2014

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“Her agony was the song and the song held so many voices…” This line encompasses the melancholy, yet beautiful, passage into adulthood of sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly depicted in Daniel Woodrell’s book, Winter’s Bone, as well as the exquisite writing style of said author. When beginning this book I had many reservations: the novel had been made into a movie that I had never seen, but heard wasn’t anything to write home about, and when I have read literature for school in the past, I have been emotionally disconnected from the material because it wasn’t of my own choosing. With this said, I was pleasantly surprised with the way this tale captured me and drew me in so that I felt close to the characters themselves. That is another credit to Woodrell’s writing style. He clearly defines the characters as well as their personalities, their purpose in the story, and their motives.
Ree’s physical, mental, and emotional journey begins when her father, a meth manufacturer, leaves his wife and three children behind, telling Ree to only look for him “soon as you can see my face”. The author implies that this is not a rare occurrence. After some time a police officer shows up at the Dolly’s doorstep, asking where Ree’s father Jessup is. The officer informs her that he can’t find her father, who is out of jail on bond and has a court date within the week. If Jessup doesn’t show up to court they will lose their home and land because he signed them over for his bond. With the realization that she may have to care for her two younger brothers and mentally ill mother with no roof over their heads, Ree makes the decision to find her father before time is up.
In her quest to locate her father, Ree must ask for the help of several of her kin folk and Jessup’s drug running crowd who live in the area, which is a very dangerous, and brave, thing to do. The first character we meet is Jessup’s brother, Teardrop, who is unwilling to aid Ree in her search. At first glance it is hard to tell whether he is an adversary or an antagonist, but it becomes clearer as the story progresses. Another memorable character, Ree’s childhood best friend Gail, is also a key component to the story as well as an important ally. There are a lot of unexpected twists and turns as the plot lopes (a favorite verb of Woodrell’s) forward.
One character with whom I felt a particular connection was Ree. She is strong, motivated, and independent. Growing up in the Ozarks has hardened her and she is better for it. Her personality is rough around the edges with a little bit of attitude, but she has a softness when it comes to her younger brothers, Harold and Sonny, and her friend Gail. Ree’s strength and persistence is enviable.
Another character who was well-defined and intriguing was Uncle Teardrop. He is a meth cook and a junkie, taking at least one hit in every scene that he is featured, and has a prison tattoo of three teardrops leaking from his eye, thus the name “Teardrop”. Ree is scared of him and for good reason: he has an explosive, unpredictable temper that causes him to become violent, most likely a side effect from his generous use of meth.
Ree’s mother was the third character who stood out to me. It is never plainly stated what her mental ailment is, but she is clearly not in a position to help around the house, much less to care for her three children. When Officer Baskin arrives at their home to find Jessup at the beginning of the novel, he asks to speak with his wife, only to find her curled in a rocking chair, mumbling about writing on the wall. She is a permanent fixture in that chair throughout the book, rarely moving or speaking. It is often implied that she went crazy in order to remain ignorant of the problems that Jessup’s involvement with meth tends to stir up. It’s hard to blame her, given the current situation Ree is embroiled in.
Seeing the way that the people who populate the Ozarks live was very eye-opening. In the “About the Author” section of Winter’s Bone there is a paragraph describing Daniel Woodrell’s history, including the fact that he was born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks just as Ree was. This information gives the novel an even more authentic feel since it is most likely based on Woodrell’s personal experiences enduring the hardships of living in a small community plagued with methamphetamine production and usage. He, like the main character of his novel, left school and enlisted in the marines as Ree wished to at the age of seventeen.
All in all, with the tense, fast-paced plot pushing you along, this book is definitely one that will make you feel as if you are traveling along the snow-coated roads right alongside Ree. You will find yourself rooting for her and her family while reveling in Woodrell’s eloquent writing style. Pay attention as you read, however- there is so much symbolism and foreshadowing that you will probably have to read it twice!

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cody tevis

Book Review

Reviewed in the United States on November 18, 2013

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Winter’s Bone is a very interesting book to say the least. Daniel Woodrell has taken a very unique opportunity to combine actual experience into a fictional story. Winter’s Bone has very unique insight into real life situations. The book takes place in the Ozarks of Missouri. It portrays the value and intensity of tight family networks and how they infect, effect, and defect the community. The main character, Ree, is a 16 year old that spends her days hunting, gathering wood, and taking care of her two brothers and out of touch mother. Ree Dolly is part of a tight knit family that seems to operate as a complicated network of defense.
They are a community, a group of isolated independents that are almost completely disconnected from society. So much so, it is hard to determine the time period. This book was a very interesting story to say the least. It has a captivating plot, and gritty characters. Woodrell does a phenomenal job at providing an opportunity to place you and your imagination into the dark, lugubrious, gloom that is Winter’s Bone. His use of imagery is exceptional, and his ability to catch the reader’s attention is evident. However, keeping the readers attention is a different story. Though he does a great job of describing the ever changing surroundings with detail it sometimes turns into monotony.
It seems as though the story could have been told in a fifty less pages because there was so much random dead space. Woodrell would take four pages to explain Ree sitting in the woods and explaining her thoughts when in reality they don’t add a lot to the book. There are parts of the book however that are mental chew toys. The characterization in this story is really enjoyable. Not so much because they have dark rogue personalities, but more so because Woodrell lived about 30 minutes from the Ozarks almost all his life. He knows how people are there, so the characters in this story are fictional characters in the sense of their names, occupations, and specific personal traits. To the effect of the characteristics of the populous in the specific geographical setting of the book compared to real life communities in the Ozarks, it is scary accurate.
It’s quite impressive how on point Woodrell is with the relational interactions and communal systems in place in the Ozarks. The family network Ree is interlocked in is heavily involved with meth. Cooking, using, selling, the whole 9 yards and then some the family uses it as their crutch and bread winner. The meth usage is so heavy in this region they have created their own defense system that is so panicked they turn on their own family if they get too close. Even law enforcement is handicapped to the tight family drug lords. It’s unusual for more than one patrol car to come down the unforgiving terrain more than once a month even though they know there is such heavy drug trafficking being flushed through the veins of the networking body dubbed the Ozarks.
Ree is a teenager, and she is doing all she can for what family she has left. She isn’t getting involved with he meth but rough and toughs it through the cold winter finning for herself. She is on a journey, a hunt for her father. A man full of empty promises and Ill be backs. He has disappeared into the world like always had before except this time there is a price to pay if he doesn’t show up. Her father committed a crime and put the only thing Ree and her Mom have to theirs names. Their property. He put their house and land up for bond. Ree goes on a hunt for the father that didn’t show up for his court date, because she is going to find him and bring him back dead or alive. Whatever it takes, she is determined to keep her home. Without it her and her family would be thrown out on the streets and with out a doubt wouldn’t last more than a couple days out in the cold death grip of winter. It’s a gripping adventure that keeps you thinking.
It’s a good read and isn’t hard to follow most of the time. Over all I give the book three and a half stars out of five. It’s worth your time and you learn a little bit about the history of the area. If you’re not into stressful, unpredictable, plot wrenches it’s not for you. If you like a roller coaster of a book that has a lot of loops as well as long stretches, you would enjoy it.

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M. Sundström

An Ozark gem

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 21, 2011

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Short version: excellent read. A definite buy.

Long version
I notice that Amazon helpfully offers "backwoods" among other tag suggestions, and for good reason. This is the hinterland of America where everybody is related to everybody else, and holds a grudge against them too. The economy in the Ozarks seems to revolve around "cooking", and rather more violent crime. Seventeen year old Ree Dolly ("a Dolly bred and buttered") belongs to one of these extended, and pretty squalid clans, and she faces utter destitution unless she can find her father - and find him in a hurry. That's the surface story, but the theme is when the ties of blood are thick enough actually to mean anything. Who, in your own large and far-flung family, would you help, if that help required anything substantial? In the Ozarks where rough men are easily offended, and offense taken means lifes taken, this question counts.

For some reason, I have of late homed in on American "unfortunates". Winter's Bone was preceded by Suttree (Cormac McCarthy), and "Ham on Rye" (Charles Bukowski). Both books have been lauded as among the respective authors' best works. Squalor you get aplenty, but Winter's Bone seems qualitatively different. In Ham on Rye (like in all of Bukowski's novels) we follow someone whose black drive will dictate his choices, and spiral him down and out. In Suttree we get a similar notion that the subsistence life the protagonist leads is at least in part a matter of choice. In the Ozarks, by contrast, life is imposed on you: it is not something easily swayed by something as ephemeral as choice. Woodrell's portrayal of Lee Dolly is so poignant because of the steel she brings to her ambition to attack the approaching problem head-on, danger and social taboos be damned. Beyond the theme of blood, this is a book about the American Dream - not about where you end up as a result of it, but about the sort of spirit you need to have a go at it.

Should you buy it?
Absolutely. This is a book rich in quality, from the intriguing gallery of characters, to the wonderfully sparse language that Woodrell uses to depict the bleak, midwinter Ozarks - not to mention the powerful thematic undertows - this is unequivocally a grade A product.

2 people found this helpful

rhysthomashello

Ozarks are awesome

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 23, 2011

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Ree Dolly's father has gone missing and she needs to find him before the bail bondsman takes her family home. He's mixed up in some pretty nasty business - his major talent is making drugs - and nobody is saying anything because it is the way of the Ozarks to keep to your own devices.

I love stories about way out of the way places in America, those hidden folds, and when they're written with the extraordinariness of Winter's Bone I'm in heaven. American fiction is a funny old thing because it's hard to say what is its defining style. Is it modern, clever writing a la Jonathan Franzen and Don DeLillo, or the solid old time landscape reflecting humanity a la Cormac McCarthy and John Steinbeck? Well it's the latter section that Woodrell falls into. His description of the Ozark mountains is stunning, and the way these cold barren places make cold, dark people is brought vividly to life. His writing thrusts you into that environment of frozen soil and freezing rivers and the story he drops on you is simple and lyrical.

The way of life is seen through the eyes of the rough and ready Ree Dolly, a girl of school age who is tasked to look after his mentally ill mother and two young brothers because her father is more often than not absent. She dreams of joining the Army, getting away from her roots, but how can she when there's nobody there to run the homestead? Her character is beautifully rendered, her resilience demonstrated in a series of frightening and awful scenes where she has to deal with unfriendly locals who don't like being asked difficult questions. You really find yourself rooting for her. This book is on a par with the Franzen but in a wholly different way.

11 people found this helpful

Mr. P. F. Harrison

Winter's Bone: Daniel Woodrell

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 25, 2014

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This is a very bleak, sparse narrative, following the struggle of a young woman to hold her family (ailing Mum and two young brothers) together against the background of a frighteningly dysfunctional culture, the 'poor whites' of the Ozark region of the US. It is a damning indictment of the current, dominant 'You can have it all' US culture, laying bare the rancid underbelly of the American Dream. The society in which she moves is feral, where it is almost literally a 'dog-eat-dog' struggle for an amazingly basic way of life. Paradoxically, her peers and relatives consider themselves bound by ideas of family loyalty, and the extreme disparity between their fantasy of 'family' and what they actually do to each other is drawn out in excruciating, unsparing detail.
There is some hope, in that the main character does succeed in her immediate aim of keeping a roof over her and her family's heads. Yet one is left with a chilling sense of the profound horrors that people will endure, and still continue to exist, day after day, year after year.

5 people found this helpful

peter braithwaite

Very realistic

Reviewed in Canada on July 24, 2020

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This is not the type of book I'd normally read - really don't know what led me to buy it. But, once started, I could not put it down. Startlingly realistic in terms of life in certain areas of the USA and likely in some other countries. A family is severely damaged by their involvement in the illegal drugs business; one of the children has to stand up to the local culture and customs to make a life for herself and her siblings. Sad in a way, but realistic - painfully so.

One person found this helpful

Maxine Clarke

Sad and telling novel about a girl's quest

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 6, 2011

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Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell is a poetic novella set in the Ozarks - the impoverished and (in this book) icily cold mountain region of Missouri and Arkansas. Ree Dolly is a 16-year-old member of one of the clannish and impoverished families of the area, and the book describes her Homeric search for her missing father, who has put up the family house as security against a court appearance. The privations experienced by Ree as she pursues her apparently hopeless quest, against a background of trying to keep her small family together, are horrific. The hideous ramifications of "crank" (methamphetamine) production, the modern moonshine, are so intensely conveyed that I sometimes could barely read on. Yet the book is not gratuitous - rather I kept wondering why Ree let herself suffer so. We know she dreams of joining the US Army, but why does she stay in this closed community - closed to the assistance of education, medicine and the law? I was answered by the end of the book, when Ree's Greek tragedy is played out: like Frodo, she has played by the only rules that can matter for her, and she receives her reward. A desperately sad book, brilliantly conveying the histories and culture of these people, and one that won't leave you in a hurry.

5 people found this helpful

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Winter's Bone Library Binding – October 23, 2008

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