by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

Winter's Bone, by Daniel Woodrell,
Back Bay Books, 2006
ISBN 0-316-06641-9
Available at Powell's Books

Fierce, desperate, and relentless as a force of nature, 16-year-old Ree Dolly spins into action and unthinkable trouble in Daniel Woodrell’s novel Winter’s Bone, a novel for older teens as well as adults.

Ree is chopping wood on an icy winter day when a sheriff’s deputy arrives unwelcome at her home in the fictional Rathlin Valley of southern Missouri’s rolling, hilly Ozark plateau.

He tells Ree the bad news that her father, Jessup, has skipped a court date concerning his most recent arrest for cooking crystal meth—the main industry of her extended family and community.

Large, menacing dilemma
Ree last saw Jessup in the autumn when he paced the porch as walnuts “were thumping to ground in the night like stalking footsteps of some large thing.”

The “large thing” begins to take shape as the deputy explains that Jessup put up their house and woods as bond. Ree, her mentally ill mother, and her two small brothers will soon be homeless if she doesn’t find Jessup.

So begins a treacherous backwoods journey on foot from one threatening relative to another through frigid winter storms so intense that Ree’s hoody becomes “an ice hat and her shoulders a cold hard yoke.”

When no one in the large Dolly clan reaches out to help, Ree begins to suspect that her loving, yet ever-disappearing father has vanished forever and in the worst way .

Woodrell owns the Ozarks
Woodrell lives in the country he chronicles and has written a number of novels in a style that some refer to as hillbilly noir. According to an interview by John Williams in the London newspaper, The Independent, Woodrell lives near where he was born, which is West Plains in southern Missouri.

Nearby, Williams writes, is “a valley lined with down-at-the-heels houses. There’s an air of gypsy camp about this place: Collinsville, the inspiration for Winter’s Bone.”

Woodrell is to modern-day, backwoods Missouri as William Faulkner was to small-town Mississippi in the early twentieth century. It has been said that Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County was his “postage stamp.” Similar to Faulkner, Woodrell is developing the Ozarks as his own postage stamp. As Williams notes in his interview, Woodrell “brings the region and its people vividly to life.”

A tangled logic
Woodrell does this in fine detail, such as when he explores the bizarre logic of men's names in the Dolly clan.  Ree considers this as she hunkers down in an ice storm outside the house of Thump Milton Dolly, who is considered the leader of her large, tangled family.  Ree waits in vain for hours, hoping for an audience with him.

“To occupy her mind, she decided to name all the Miltons: Thump, Blond, Catfish, Spider, Whoop, Rooster, Scrap…Lefty, Dog, Punch, Pink-eye, Momsy…Cotton, Hog-jaw, Ten Penny, Peashot…enough. Enough Miltons. To have but few male names in use was a tactic held over from the olden knacker ways…. Let any sheriff or similar nabob try to keep official accounts on the Dolly men when so many were named Milton, Haslam, Arthur or Jessup…. But the great name of the Dollys was Milton, and at least two dozen Miltons moved about in Ree’s world. If you named a son Milton it was a decision that attempted to chart the life he’d live before he even stepped into it, for among Dollys the name carried expectations and history.”

Despite all resistance, Ree persists. In the harsh yet hopeful end of Winter's Bone she proves to be just as indomitable as Thump Milton.