Winter's Bone: A Novel
By: Daniel Woodrell / Narrated By: Emma Galvin
Length: 4 hrs and 53 mins
Savagery, Poetry, in stark, stark, STARK motion. Just TRY to breathe during this one…!
Is it time to fess up here, or can you pretty much guess it: I just really don’t get out to watch movies. And if there’s a book out there that the flick was based on? Oh gosh, why on earth would I wanna see a movie when chances are the book is sooo much better?
I did NOT see Winter’s Bone when it came out to the theaters, tho’ I did indeed catch the rave reviews for Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal of not-yet-17-year-old Ree Dolly, the heroine who lives in the Missouri end of the Ozarks. And I gotta tell ya, I’m so very glad I’ve hit the audiobook first (Okay okay okay so, like, p’raps I DON’T do the book first… not if there’s an audiobook version…!) as, ‘pon glancing through movie reviews, I see that the story and some of its characters were changed up a might bit… too much, in my opinion. Cuz boy, does this baby shine, or what?!
When the story opens, however? Uh-oh, said I to m’self: I’m gonna haaaate narrator Emma Galvin because, my GOD, she doesn’t even TRY, not even one itsy bitsy bit, to project anything even vAGUEly resembling an inflection, emotion, variance to her tone or speed.
-BUT then?-
We get to know our heroine Ree. From the get-go we meet a no-nonsense, tough to the marrow, girl, even as she strides purposefully in dresses through the Ozark Winter, all whilst wearing too-big combat boots and her (Insane) mother’s old coat.
The girl is ready for war, ready for whatever Life will bring, and with one tiny hope: That she’ll survive long enough to get outta there, find a place in the Army. No food in their chaotic and filthy cabin? And her little brothers hint that they should ask for handouts, a little piece of deer, from the neighbors? Ree smacks hard: Never BEG, don’t ask ANYone for ANYthing. Then, the fire’s dying out. Ree’s the one to go out, exposed to the wind and freezing cold, as she blows snot from her nostrils onto the ice, as she catches a rhythm to chop wood. And all the while, headphones on, filling her ears, her mind, her soul, with snatches of sounds from way off, far off: Maybe the sea and waves, maybe soft whispered breezes in warm parts.
All is as it was, as it ever will be, at least until she can prepare her little brothers for Life and Fending for the Family, and she can escape to the Army.
Until, she finds that her dad, who hasn’t been seen for some time, has a court date coming up (Meth cooking), and he (Jessup) had put their land, their home up as collateral to make bond. If Jessup doesn’t show, the family will have to vacate, leaving them to live like dogs, with nothing. Cuz tho’ Family is everything in these Hills, tho’ Blood and Kin rule, there ain’t a soul alive who will lift a finger to help.
This is Ree’s life, and her desperation to find Jessup, her slowly dawning realization that he’s dead, her helter skelter search to find proof of his death, become everything. Along the way, there are dustups where she’s warned, with violence, that there’ll be even more violence headed her way if she keeps asking questions. Teardrop, Jessup’s last living kin, his brother, won’t think a thing if she gets hurt along the way.
And she does get hurt, brutally so. There’s complete and utter despair as she navigates her surroundings, desperation seen and digested, love found in friendship that’s the truest kind. And maybe? Maybe there’s even kinfolk who’ll take her side when she’s left to die, kinfolk—however hopped up on whiskey and meth—who’ll tell her the truth, as long as she never tells what she knows, as suspicion will probably later lead to murder, that final nail in coffins ever-filling in these Hills, with these families who’ll turn a blind-eye, until they don’t.
Author Woodrell never lost me on his prose, which despite the brutality, is ever poetic yet never flowery, never purple prose. Ree thinks deeply, so she sees life in certain ways, she sees her surroundings as akin to all those soundscapes she clings to, dreams which are so very at odds with the sharp edges, the ferocity of her world, where all seems vicious… but it truly isn’t. It’s simply the people’s way, the way of the land, their way of life and pot and meth meth meth. You always cook, cook safe; you never ask questions; you never ask for anything; and for god’s sake: You NEVER snitch.
Tho’ Galvin’s narration of this poetry, the main narrative, is dull, flat, dry, my GOD does she bring the razor to dialogue like nothing I’ve ever heard before. Whether it’s Teardrop with his half-melted face not so much warning Ree as reMINding her that he’d as soon shoot her as he would a dog if she sniffs too close, or it’s the trueness of her best friend Gail, always there for Ree unless things get too uncertain, too bestial and too close to her own child for safety’s sake. All the way to women who are just as dispassionately fierce as the menfolk whom they serve like common whores. Throw in a mother who’s chosen insanity over her reality, add two little brothers who might grow up with the ravages of want pointing them towards addiction, meth, and prison… and maybe early graves. And MAN, Galvin delivered each and every biting sentence with a rawness hitherto unheard by me.
Stark, beYONd brutal.
Unforgettable…
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