She longs to join the army, the usual gimcrack route for those born lacking luck or money to get out of a place where, at 12, people are 'dead to wonder. She has 'abrupt green eyes' and 'a body made for loping after needs'. The main character is Ree, a 16-year-old female member of the terrifying Dolly clan, to which we were first introduced in the late-Nineties novel Give Us a Kiss. Words such as 'bleak' and 'beautiful' and 'heartbreaking' spring to mind. This trend continues with Winter's Bone, a characteristically short novel of tremendous and, at times, ferocious power. While it is fair to call his career somewhat patchy, his recent books have evinced a care and a commitment and a skill that he continues to nurture and hone so that his most recent book tends to be his best. Woodrell's work is little known on this side of the Atlantic, except maybe for his second novel, Woe to Live On, which was filmed by Ang Lee as Ride With the Devil. 'Inasmuch as the Ozarks have any public profile or place in the national myth, it's as a Deliverance-style backwoods place, full of illiterate rednecks fishing and drinking moonshine and intermarrying,' Williams writes.
This is Daniel Woodrell's seventh novel and his fourth set in the Ozark Mountains, one of those American regions 'that the world at large has decided to pass by', to quote John Williams from his forthcoming book, Back to the Badlands.
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