yes.

this is pretty much why i read, to find a book like this amongst all the three-star so-so's. and it wasn't love at first sight (which might make the experience even better; i didn't love winesberg, ohio right out of the gate either) - i had some reservations from the first page, when the poetic quality of the language seemed forced and i wasn't going to deal with 200 pages of:
"three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside...", or "Ree, brunette and sixteen, with milk More...

It’s funny how my brain works. So this novel is about a strong teenage girl living in conditions of depressing destitution without a father, caring for her sibling(s) and her invalid mother, cooking for them, bathing them, getting them ready for school, and generally assuming a responsibility that far exceeds her years—she even hunts squirrel! Any of this sound familiar? Maybe I’m not the only one who was reminded of Katniss Everdeen, but what’s interesting is that both Everdeen and Ree Dolly, t More...

Reading this book made me realize how FRIGGIN' SHELTERED my life has been. To me, Winter's Bone reads just like a nightmarish dystopia. To millions of people, apparently, it's life.



Ree Dolly is incredibly tough and hardened by life - much more than you'd expect from a sixteen-year-old girl.

"She could be beat with a garden rake and never cry and had proved that twice before Mamaw saw an unsmiling angel pointing from the treetops at dusk and quit the bottle. She would never cry where her tears

More...

This short novel has many things I enjoy in dark fiction – quirky, dysfunctional characters, a determined heroine struggling to survive and keep her family together, a bleak setting, a sense of hopelessness, people who pay the price for their bad choices. This is a quiet story that crept up on me slowly and haunted me for days afterward.

Actually, it terrified me and made me glad I grew up in New York City. Sure, there were shootings, muggings, carjackings, and stabbings. You just had to watch y More...

Beautifully written, this is a simple story about survival, winter and bones. The main thing to survive is poverty - the kind where buttonless overcoats are de rigueur, and hunting and skinning squirrels is not done strictly for entertainment. It's in the Ozarks and winter is bone-cracking cold. We open the book to a hint of flurries, and venison hanging in trees to "sweeten that meat to the bone", and we meet Ree Dolly, our tough teen heroine.

The title "Winter's Bone" for me summoned a cold, t More...

Ree Dolly's father has jumped bail, leaving their home forfeit unless Ree can find him before his court date. Will she be able to find her father before she ends up homeless with her two brothers and insane mother?

First off, I have a confession to make. I live in rural Missouri and, therefore, some of the locations depicted in the story seem a lot like places I've driven through at a high rate of speed. Also, I've eaten squirrel on at least two occasions. Now, on to the meat of the review.

Winter More...

I grew up in a rural area with no shortage of poor rednecks so I thought I knew about country poverty, but the people I knew with their decayed farm houses and trailers lived like Donald Trump compared to the backwoods clan of hill folk in this book.

Ree Dolly is a 16-year old girl who dropped out of high school to take care of her crazy mother and two younger brothers. She lives in a remote part of the Ozarks where the only job opportunities are in crystal meth production. Ree plans on joining t More...

Ok, I read Winter's Bone on D and Karen's recommendations, so I’m posting links to their reviews before I start:

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

and

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Winter’s Bone is a hell of a book in that A) the novel is fantastic, and B) it's set in an American version of hell. The story of Ree, a teenage girl charged with finding her bail-jumping father in order to save her family’s house, catches fire early and never cools down. Ree lives in a terrifying sectio More...

Man, O Man, can this guy write. This is a very impressive novel. Here is language that soars, home-spun lyricisms, trailer-trash poetry, a book chock-full of crackhead sonnet riffs; Woodrell is a virtuoso of the first degree.

In Ree Dolly, the teenage protagonist he has conjured up, he has invented somebody you'll remember gladly until your dying days. Fiercely courageous with a keen eye for the moral effrontery foisted on her small shoulders by kin close and distant, she is feisty as a stirred- More...

4.5 stars

“The heart's in it then, spinning dreams, and torment is on the way. The heart makes dreams seem like ideas.”

Being familiar with the film adaptation of Winter’s Bone, I had a hunch that I was going to like Daniel Woodrell’s novel, particularly if it turned out that the characters I’d found so compelling on screen were a faithful rendering of their written counterparts. Had I known that I would love Daniel Woodrell’s writing so much, I think I might have sought it out sooner.

This is a More...

Video interviews and trailers @ my webpage http://more2read.com/review/winters-bone-by-daniel-woodrell/

A teenage girl whose surrounded by people getting by surviving on the ways they know how. Some honesty others through criminal activity. They know each other, different clans that operate in the same circles of business. Her father has slipped up and a bondsman pays a visit with threats of seizing their land if he does not present himself. But he has erred in a more deadly slip, he snitched and More...

Winter's Bone: Daniel Woodrell's Tale of When Blood is thicker than water

When I was a boy we had no Interstates. The car was not air-conditioned. A trip from Tuscaloosa to North Alabama was a twisting, turning drive through mountains and steep valleys as you drove into the northern part of the County. We traveled early to avoid the afternoon heat. The mists rose up from the valleys making the mountains look as though they grew out of clouds. My grandfather would comment on the smell of the worki More...

I hate it when I hear people say their life 'sucks', or their life is 'horrible.' If they want to see a life which sucks, and is truly horrible, they should step into Ree Dolly's life for a day. I bet they wouldn't last until noon...And just because the sun goes down, doesn't mean the day is over. Sometimes, it's just getting started.

For me, what makes Winter's Bone so heartbreaking is, there are real people who live like this. This is one novel I don't think which was exaggerated for the effect More...

I've put off writing a review for this book because I always struggle with the great ones and Woodrell's Winter's Bone is one of those (with a capital G). It's craft and heart and drama and beauty. It's poetry and grit, entangled in an embrace of love and hatred.

Woodrell offers up a stinging portrait of impoverished life in the Ozarks, where kin saves as often as it condemns. The hill people of Ree's world live by their own laws separate from that of the state -- of paramount importance, don't More...

3 – 3.5 stars

I think I may have come to this book with excessive expectations given the consistently high ratings and voluminous praise in GR friends’ reviews. That’s not to say that this was a bad book, or that I didn’t enjoy it, but for me this book didn’t hit the sweet spot that it seemed to reach for most others.

Ree Dolly is a tough-as-nails adolescent living a hand-to-mouth existence in perhaps the worst possible conditions in the backwoods of the Ozarks, forced to care for her two younger More...

A few authors over the course of the past few years have recently stood out above the normal, literary crowd—for me, anyways. And the thing I noticed about these authors is that they all seem to write darker fiction. If I had to say, a good representation of these authors is: Roberto Bolano, Cormac McCarthy, Castle Freeman, Jr., and now, Daniel Woodrell.

These authors make up a class of writers that I have termed Brutal Poets. Their use of language invokes a visceral response from the reader, so More...

Sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly is barely holding her family together. She has two little brothers, a mother whose mind is gone, and a missing father. Her father has apparently jumped bail and disappeared. Ree has to find him, dead or alive. If she doesn't, the family will be homeless.

Ree's search for her dad among the hills and woods and caves of the Ozarks drives the story. It involves a mostly unsavory bunch of characters. These are woman-beatin', 'shine-suckin', crank-cookin', doobie-tokin', squ More...

Sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly, lives in the Ozark hill country with her father (a meth-cooker), her mother (with Alzheimer's-like symptoms), and her two fairly normal younger brothers. Ree is the family care giver, as her father is frequently gone. Her father has disappeared again as the story opens, which is not unusual. A problem arises when she finds out he has a felony court date in two weeks and he has put their house and timberland up as bond. They will lose everything if he doesn't make the More...

One thing I can promise you for sure, is that you will not soon forget Ree Dolly, the tough as nails heroine of Daniel Woodrell's brilliant new novel, Winter's Bone. This book is almost unbearably good; the language alone would almost carry the book for me, but then there's a riveting plot, and fascinating cast of characters as well. In short, this book has got it all.

Ree Dolly's father is not only the best crank cooker in their neck of the woods, he is also missing, leaving Ree behind to take More...

I think this sums up my reading experience nicely.
'Let me read'
'No' *grabby hands*

17% - (no page numbers in the kindle edition) - Just a gritty drama of a young girl in a really poor area. It was a movie too with the same actress as Hunger Games.

I broke down and got the audiobook to use Whispersync for voice, and there's only 15 chapters in the audiobook and 35 in the kindle book. Gahhhh.

Actually the sync between audio and kindle works, but it's not exact (sometimes it is!), and you can't go earlier in a book. It will always sync to the 'furthest position', unless you tempora More...

I wouldn’t say the film improved upon the book, but rather, it revealed the limits of my own imagination, which is what good adaption can do. The film imagined the abject poverty of the Ozarks with more dignity and respect than I could. Characters I thought of as monsters in the book came through with such humanity on screen—their restraint told you so much about who they were and their strict code of conduct. The mythic overtones I gathered from the book—Ree Dolly as a modern-day Antigone—were More...

I grew up in the Ozarks. I lived in a small town, as opposed to the particular sort of rural extended-family hereditary community portrayed in Winter’s Bone, and I had grown and gone before the meth epidemic (which plays an important part in this story) rolled over the region, but I've seen enough of rural Ozark culture to say Daniel Woodrell's vision rings true. The author draws you right in to this harsh, visceral world with his mastery of description and his authentic characterization.

16-yea More...

I don't know -- is it me? People seemed to really like this book, according to goodreads and Amazon reviews, but I just couldn't get into it. It seemed like your typical Oprah book; I felt like I was reading "Cold Mountain," "Peace Like a River," and several others blurred into one indistinguishable mass. Everyone raved about the heroine, Ree Dolly, who felt like a cliche to me and a pretty one-dimensional one at that -- young, tough, heroic hick-town girl, like Renee Zellweger's character in "C More...

Ooh, this is a goodie! The deceptively simple prose masks a superb, hard-hitting writing style which makes you want to re-read passages for the sheer beauty of the writing. Set amidst the desolate Ozark Hills of Southern Missouri, this is the story of feisty teenager, Ree Dolly, who undertakes the daunting task of tracking down her feckless father before he breaks the terms of his bail and loses the family home. Ree already lives on the edge, trying to keep the wolf from the door and she is advi More...

I realize that when we read about fairly-true-life people and places, it’s insensitive to be all, “I AM SO GLAD THIS IS NOT MY LIFE HOLY SHIT ARE YOU KIDDING ME!??!” because for all we know those people are proud of their lives and their homes and their heritages and we shouldn’t use our own assumptions to judge their way of life.

That being said, I AM SO GLAD THIS IS NOT MY LIFE HOLY SHIT ARE YOU KIDDING ME!??!

Because unlike our heroine Ree Dolly, I do not have balls of steel.

If all my creepy i More...

When I cracked this book open and read the first page, I was afraid I'd be annoyed and put off by the prose, which was wildly metaphorical, densely literary and wandered on a great deal.

Once I got past the opening, though, and actually met the characters—sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly, her little brothers Sonny and Harold, her mother whose mind is wandering, her best friend Gail—I was sucked into Ree's world of desperation and dogged stubbornness.

Winter is at the door, and the family is subsisting o More...

Ozark, Missouri, Stati Uniti. Segnatevi il nome e non ci andate mai, neanche per sbaglio, soprattutto d'inverno, perché assomiglia a un inferno in cui, al posto del fuoco, troverete ghiaccio, neve e ossa di cadaveri (il titolo originale sarebbe Winter's Bone). In questo girone bianco dal quale sarebbe meglio girare alla larga, le famiglie hanno tutte i pochi stessi cognomi e tutte sono imparentate le une con le altre, gli uomini raffinano cocaina e imbracciano un fucile un momento sì e l'altro p More...

In this book, Woodrell took a beautifully bleak shard from the life of Ree Dolly and presented it to his readers without judgement or resolution. I finished this book wanting to know more about Ree, wondering if she would ever get to leave her home and make a life for herself. Was her fight futile because she was still burdened by her reality at the end, or is it her fight that makes her so alive and vivid in such a harsh and unforgiving land?

I think one of the reasons this book hit me so hard i More...