Winter’s Bone.

Miss Carol LOVED this book.

I think I did.

Set in the Ozarks, Ree Dolly needs to find her bail-bond-jumping father before the courts call in the tab and Ree and her two little brothers and brain-addled mother all get kicked to the curb.

I fucking loved Daniel Woodrell’s prose and the way he shone a light on mountain life.

Folks, them’s hard people.

I’ve read other books with ancillary stories about mountain people- be they Sierra Madres or Appalachians- and I don’t know if it’s the constant contact with mountains and all that rock and hard stuff but holy jeebers you don’t want to mess with them. They’s HARD.

At first I hated the obscurity and obliqueness. I thought there were parts of the story that were being kept from me, that I wasn’t privy to ’cause I wasn’t a mountain person, ’cause I wasn’t an Ozarky native son.

But then I tackled my Mr. Narcissism and wrestled him to the ground and sat on top of him and thought that maybe that was EXACTLY what Mr. Dan was trying to accomplish.

You are left out. ‘Cause you don’t belong.

And I think that’s the beauty of Winter’s Bone.

So, yeah, I think I love this book too.