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Monday, 14 August 2006 02:21

When her meth-addicted father skips bail, Ree Dolly's got no choice but to track him down, dead or alive, or the family’s house will be snatched right out from other them.

Daniel Woodrell’s Ozarks aren’t the sort of rustic hideaway where you’d want to leave the front door unlocked. They’re a place where you’d answer that door holding a shotgun because you never know who might be on the other side. Like his two most recent novels, Tomato Red and The Death of Sweet Mister, both New York Times Notable Books of the year, Winter’s Bone is an unflinching, sometimes uncomfortable ride through the Ozark landscape the author calls home.

This time we follow Ree Dolly, a girl dead set on making a life for herself outside the backwoods town where her family’s lived for generations. It’s a town where the name “Dolly” hangs like a curse, virtually ensuring a life of poverty for whoever inherits it. Ree trudges through each day, sometimes using her Walkman to escape, drowning out the world with tapes like “The Sounds of Tropical Dawn,” and dreams of another life. At 17 she’s already been saddled with caring for her two younger brothers and her sickly mother. And it gets worse. When her meth-addicted father skips bail, she’s got no choice but to track him down, dead or alive, or the family’s house will be snatched right out from other them. Since most of her friends and neighbors have their own problems to worry about, Ree’s on her own. A single-minded focus to keep the family together is about the only thing driving her along.

It isn’t the stuff of postcards, to say the least; it’s an ugly world, but Woodrell describes the gritty, poverty-stricken place with nothing less than love. There’s a strange, down-home rhythm to his sentences, and he shines a light on a world where life is a struggle and Ree’s dogged determination just to get up every morning makes her a sort of hero.