Winter's Bone

Ah, "Winter's Bone," how I've derived a guilty pleasure in reading you; yet you stand as a reminder of why I don't care for the grimy style of storytelling so popular this past decade. 

Compliments of Amazon.com

Daniel Woodrell is the beginning of my problem with this book, but is also responsible for a lot of my enjoyment of it. Honestly the man has written some of my least favorite books, and I'm not just saying that to be a disagreeable. I won't get too deeply into my personal feelings, and instead try to stick to reviewing the book and not his writing style. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to get a little of that out of my system before I can write anything serious in relation to this book. As I have found with all of his books, I get sucked in to the story and tend to read them cover to cover over the course of a day. My problem is, I glaze over certain parts of the book that he spends way too much time on. For instance: Spending a paragraph describing urine hitting a wall; I'm not kidding, -for those of you that haven't reached that point in the reading yet- he gets into far too much detail on the subject. Now don't get me wrong, I'm far from a prude, and this isn't gross to me; I simply think it's a joke, and if it's not, it strikes me as poor decision making about the stories flow -no pun intended-. I understand that the very idea of the writing is to be very vivid and real, but I can think of a lot of books that are both; only they achieve this by being good, not by spending an uncomfortable amount of time describing bodily functions. This isn't my only issue with the book, but it serves as the best example. The story on the other hand, was fantastic -as it seems to be frequently with Woodrell-. I was instantly engaged, the man paints scenes beautifully, and I enjoyed about ninety-five percent of it. So while I can't say it was a bad book by any means, I can say that some authors should stick to what they're good at; and leave the grimy story telling to authors that are good at it. As a tangent note: I also have a personal distaste for gritty story telling. I don't know if it comes from having witnessed real human suffering and tragedy, or if I simply don't need more reality in my fiction; but I am never impressed by that type of writing. Perhaps I'm biased, I'm perfectly willing to admit that; but no matter how I feel about the content, I still enjoyed this book thoroughly.