Winter's Bone

I haven't read this book--have never heard of Daniel Woodrell--but I saw the movie adaptation recently and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. In the movie, 17-year-old Ree Dolly has a shit family, all tied up as they are in cooking, dealing, and snorting crank in the w-a-y back-woods of the Missouri Ozarks.

Ree hasn't "developed a taste for it yet," and you have to wonder--watching her skin squirrels for dinner, or beg her mentally checked-out mother to help her make a hard decision about the family timber, or cut the hands off her dead father to prove to the bondsman he's dead--why she hasn't succumbed to the siren song of meth, also known as the "poor man's cocaine." Ree's hard-nosed, paranoid relatives resent her for it, even though they're culpable in making Ree the "meth-orphan" she is. Ree learns blood ties take on new meanings when money and greed are king.

Life hasn't been easy on Ree or her younger siblings, and you know it never will be. Yet Ree perseveres, destined to forge her own way, and write her own definition of selfhood and family. Thanks to writer and director Debra Granik for this portrayal of a resilient, courageous adolescent girl who survives by sheer willpower and grit. A true heroine, reminiscent of Katniss in Hunger Games (and the movie makes me think, too, about Tyrell in Coe Booth's YA novel of the same name). New Yorker movie critic David Denby calls the film "one of the great feminist works in film."

I'm looking forward to reading the book, and getting to know Woodrell's fiction. The movie won for best dramatic film at Sundance this year, so I imagine we'll hear more about the book in days to come.