She's fearless about her passion coming out purple, and for the most part the intensity of her story carries it off. There's something of Faulkner to Ward's grand diction, which rolls between teenspeak ('I'ma get Randall' 'My dog ain't lose') and the larger, incantatory rhythms of myth. It's hard not to read the final 80 pages in a greedy frenzy, and to pray that they'll come to the attention of a film-maker such as Debra Granick, the director of Winter's Bone, itself based on a novel by Daniel Woodrell that mapped a similarly hard terrain of poverty and loyalty. The family barricade themselves into the house, armed with ramen noodles and grubby jugs of water. It's the kind of home that leaves its mark on your skin, and though they might fight, the siblings' bond is unbreakably tight.Īs the storm comes closer, all secondary concerns are erased. Esch and the boys run in packs, swimming in the black waters of the Pit, their feet permanently dusted with orange dirt. It's also a place of unearthly beauty, a wild wood planted with magnolias and live oaks.

The 'black heart of Bois Sauvage' isn't all rotten, though. The local boys of Bois Sauvage scrap among themselves, and settle these squabbles by way of dogfights: secretive battles held deep within the woods that are nightmarish in their violence, like scenes from the Greek myths Esch reads compulsively in bed. Alcohol turns Daddy from a vacant, shiftless figure into a mean drunk who doesn't like being contradicted. Often this physicality lurches into violence. Ward is astonishingly attentive to the body, from Esch's nausea and permanently bursting bladder to the light-reflecting, gorgeous skin of her beloved Manny, Skeetah's best friend and the unwilling father of her child-to-be. This bloody, graphic scene sets the tone for an all-pervading physicality. Randall, the eldest, is hoping for a basketball scholarship, while Skeetah is obsessed with his pitbull China, who gives birth to a litter of valuable puppies.

The older boys have more productive hobbies. Junior, who never knew his mother, seems at times more animal than human, a touch-hungry changeling who spends most of his days burrowing in the earth beneath the house. The sheets are so dirty that 'we'd wake up often in the middle of the night, itching, scratching a shin, an ankle'. Food is strictly rationed, and a meal of squirrel, shot in the forest and barbecued, is gulped down with stolen bread. Details seep out like involuntary revelations. She's so tough, in fact, that it takes a while to realise how deprived these motherless children are.

Salvage the bones