RaveThe Independent (UK)Daniel Woodrell\'s first novel since his celebrated Winter\'s Bone blends the folkloric with Southern gothic, historical recapitulation with fictional investigative journalism, all suffused in his matchless tenderness of telling ... The narrative quest of The Maid\'s Version is pursued by zigzag routes. Woodrell is concerned with pauperdom, inveterate dynastic feud, with the sorrows and endurance of labouring women ... I know nothing of Ozark dialect save what Woodrell has taught me – and yet I have the sense of having heard its authentic tropes and rhythms. In The Maid\'s Version, the oral and the poetic tangle and splice. Alma and Ruby are illiterate: the grandson\'s narration raises their tongue to occasional elegiac beauty. Woodrell\'s characteristic devices - zeugma, paradox, ellipsis, alliteration - are far more than decorative ... Whodunnit? The answer is low-key and perhaps less crucial than the outlandish \'winged loneliness\' of the voices the narrator echoes.
