Winter's Bone

Winter's bone by Daniel Woodrell was a quick read for me.
The way this man combines a wordy paintbrush with the complicated inter workings of a poverty stricken community in the Ozarks is just like being there. Suddenly this young woman you are reading about is so real and while it pains you to imagine the things she is put through, it is amazingly hypnotic- the twists and turns life tends to take, and you can't stop looking.
During times I was not reading this book, I wondered often, "what's going on with Ree right now?"

I recommend it. The story establishes a close to the earth importance of community without lovey-dovey idealism.
It shows a family ripped to shreds by drugs, insanity, and undeniable pangs of hunger. It shows a violent, scared people teaching and learning lessons the hard way, in the snow and ice. Thank goodness the thing ended with a new light shined on the bad guys, a new future for the good ones.

This southern-esque flavor has me wanting more.
Flannery may be a little more dark than I am in the mood for. Instead of picking a book from my next to read list, I looked around Adelaide's with Cyndy's help and found Carson Mc Cullers, a woman from a 1930's Georgia. The title I chose is The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which she wrote when she was twenty three.
So far, I'm loving the insight she displays, rotating through characters as narrators. I enjoy the meaty-ness of the story, but the dialogue seems interchangeable as if some of the characters speak from the same mouth.
Also, as much as I love to sit in the sun, reading something in a southern drawl, I am of a generation far from 1930, let alone 1930 in the south. The depiction of Black American characters is annoying and difficult for me to read. I like the broken grammar and sentence structure which seems to bring the Southern dialogue alive, but I'm snobby to lines like "And so he were l-l-laming his fists against this here brick w-w-wall." which only come from Black characters, whom are given names like Willie and are called lazy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cultural differences. I get it, Carson wasn't trying to be an ass.
I do adore southern writing, but have a difficult time with the cultural differences, particularly hose conserning race, which tend to be a hot topic for the genre.
I will read this through, and stick to more contemporary writers in the future. I like the families, communities, the religious/spiritual undertones and long descriptions of sweaty weather, or as in Winter's Bone, the mean ol winter, at the end of the rut road.