When I think of the Ozarks, I think of world-weary people and their grimy, unsmiling children. It never occurred to me that might be a burgeoning meth industry prospering within the communities! Drugs, man. They're everywhere.

Right from the first page comes a sense of bleakness that pervades the entire novel. This is not a story that will end happily ever after, or happily at all. Ree Dolly is not exactly a likable person, but as a character, she is wonderfully refreshing. A prickly young woman who defies many tired tropes of young women in literature, she is adept in survival techniques. Ree wants to join the Army (to leave her going-nowhere life behind) and she has no need for a man.

The prose of this novel is intensely readable, yet evocative, especially when describing a drug-addled state of mind. My favorite passage is from when Ree is given mushrooms by a man who had clearly had ulterior motives:

When the mushrooms took hold she sensed some of the gods calling to her from inside her own chest and followed their urging outside into the yard and up the sunny slope into the trees. She felt all gooey, gooey with the slobbered love of various gods gathered within, and smiling full-time went about the woods looking to collect butterflies and pet them until they gave milk, or maybe roll in dirt until she felt China through her skin.

I probably re-read that paragraph six or seven times. Something about the way it was constructed really poked at my tingly mind bits.