This is a well paced and well executed tale of an adolescent girl's struggle to keep her family together as events threaten to overtake her. However it's no chick lit potboiler, quite the reverse, as the heroine has to find her father who has broken bail, putting the family home at risk. There is much unsaid, as the violence and criminality of the community in which she lives bubbles to the surface. The story is searingly honest and the telling of it is beautifully executed, with secondary characters used sparingly but to great effect. It's not a long book, but more text would not have added more content and there are plenty of modern authors who need to learn that particular trick.

There is no doubt Woodrell can write. He writes poetical, elegiacal sentences dripping with meaning. The dialogue is authentic, flows naturally between protagonist and the over-riding narrative and sets the reader firmly in the geographical setting of the novel. After all, this is a writer with the Missouri Ozarks in his blood. And Ree Dolly is a very real and believable heroine, one with remarkable courage to protect her family and their land, in the face of multiple threats and burdens. I bought into her as a character and as an essential part of the story from her name used as the first two words, through to the very last page. Ree Dolly carried the narrative, as she carries her family in the story. The writing is extraordinarily good in places. Passages that demand to be re-read. Some of it as good as anything I've ever read, reminiscent of geniuses such as Cormac McCarthy or Flannery O'Connor. It is not a book that's easy to criticise. But despite the charismatic central character and the brilliantly described scenes she inhabited, it felt a little thin, underdeveloped even, almost as though some pages were mislaid on the way to the printers. I felt the tale lacked depth and lacked the resolution that Ree Dolly deserved. Maybe that's the mark of a great writer, that the reader is left wanting more?