On Daniel Woodrell's "Winter's Bone," Coming This Summer to a Theater Near You

I’m in the mood for some good reading right now, have pegged a few titles for summer reading out of sheer curiosity, and while casting a wary eye at the Summer Movies list, it’s a pleasant surprise to see this morning that Daniel Woodrells’ novel Winter’s Bone (2006) has been filmed and will play this summer:

I read Winter’s Bone at its debut and found it to be one of those offbeat, haunting books that you don’t see coming. Speed freaks in the Ozarks, scary hillbillies with meth labs, scary relatives, and a young teen protagonist that you root to leave it all behind her. It’s the kind of world where joining the military is one of the ways Out. (That’s the world I grew up in, actually: My mother was disappointed that I didn’t join the Army.) The language is sharp, lyrical, and no-nonsense. It’s not a luminous book, but one that makes us understand what it’s like to live in a world everyone else looks down upon. And as far as giving us a realistic glimpse of drug use in the Heartland, it’s much better than Nick Reding’s Methland (2009). It’s got heart, bruised and battered, toughened up.
Dan Woodrell, I’ll also note, is a nice guy, who doesn’t know me, and who offered a kind blurb for my last novel.