Daniel Woodrell · 2006 · survival

Woodrell's Ozark novel, set in country he grew up in and went back to. Ree Dolly is sixteen, keeping a house and two brothers going, when a deputy tells her that her father has put the family land up as bail and vanished - and that she has a week to produce him, alive or dead, or they lose everything.

1. 1
   Rathlin Valley

   Three houses in a rank on the far bank of a creek, and a sixteen-year-old holding a family together - a mother who has stopped speaking, two young brothers, and a father who has put the house up as bond and disappeared.

2. 2
   Rathlin Valley High

   The bus in with her brothers, and the life she is not going to have - Ree wants the army for the sign-on money, and the recruiter tells her what happens to the boys if she goes.

3. 3
   Hawkfall

   She hitchhikes to the valley where the rest of the clan lives, asking for Little Arthur and then for Thump Milton - and is made to wait an hour in the yard before his wife comes out and says he will not see her.

4. 4
   The Arkansas line

   South with her friend Gail to find April, her father's former mistress, because a woman who is owed nothing may say what the family will not - and it comes to nothing, like every other door.

5. 5
   Hawkfall

   She goes back a second time knowing what it will cost, and the Milton women beat her half to death in a barn - and Woodrell writes the aftermath from the bathtub, with the neighbour women crossing the creek to look at her.

6. 6
   The pond

   The Milton women take her out at night in a boat to the flooded place where her father is, and make her do the last of it herself with a chainsaw - which is the price of proving to a bond company that a man is dead.