This novel was adequate as historical fiction. It provided information regarding various classes of rural residents over a wide timespan. The characters were not differentiated well, and it was difficult to care about most of them. Woodrell may be a well-respected writer, but I am not motivated to read anything else he has written. This was about an explosion at a dance hall and the effects it had on the residents and their descendants. ( )

Well written but too literary for my taste. ( )

I didn't love this book, but I couldn't put it down, which is a rare trait among more literary and less plot-driven books. I appreciate the short length. It's long enough for the author to show off his chops--and boy does he--but short enough to avoid becoming cumbersome and plodding. This one is far from plodding. Based on my enjoyment, I'd knock it down a star or two, but I can't do that because it's not the book's fault that I don't enjoy living lives of poverty and struggle in rural pre-depression and depression era America. To the extent my enjoyment was diminished because I couldn't love the fully-drawn characters and because I'd prefer not to inhabit their world, it speaks to how effectively the author placed me in that world. The book deserves its full five stars for making me feel dusty and poor the way The Grapes of Wrath (another book whose effectiveness dimmed my enjoyment) did. It has little plot but a central dramatic event around which all the intertwined stories and vignettes revolve, and that central event--the explosion--provides enough dramatic tension to keep me reading, largely because of how well he pulled all the strings together and paced the gradual revelation of what happened. It isn't a fun read, but it's a great one, and I'll definitely look for more by this author when I want writing that is more art than entertainment. ( )

What Daniel Woodrell has done with The Maid’s Version is very clever. It’s based on a real event and its aftermath: there was a town hall explosion that killed and maimed many in a small town in the Ozarks in the late 1920s, and he grew up hearing the stories about it. The mystery of the explosion was never solved, the perpetrator never identified and, lacking solid knowledge of the crime, people came up with their own theories to explain it - they invented stories to fill in the empty space.

Many writers toy with the line between fiction storytelling and historical narrative. The Maid’s Version is an ingenious approach to the subject.

Instead of creating a history, he tells us a story.

The Maid’s Version is fiction. Like those who lived through the real event and their descendants, Mr. Woodrell has created another story to fill in the mysterious, empty space which surrounds it. This story is no more - and no less - true than the lore that grew up around the actual event.

Clever though this approach to the subject is, it doesn’t quite work. My strongest reaction to this novel is that I wish I didn’t know about the real history behind it. I feel like it would be a more powerful and effective story if I didn’t. If I could interact with it as a purely fictional work, I would enjoy it more.

It’s a clever idea and the narrative is very well crafted. It just doesn’t connect all the way. Were I given to baseball metaphors, I’d say this novel hits a skillful, solid double. Something to be proud of, certainly, but it’s not a home run.

What makes the work a solid double is the craftsmanship. Mr. Woodrell revels in language and sculpts beautiful, elegant, evocative, and effective phrases. He’s one of the best wordsmiths we have.

However, scattered throughout this book are a scant handful of passages that strike me as trying just a bit too hard, that come off as over-worked.

Given the overall elegance of language in this novel, given the elegance of language that I’ve come to expect from his other novels, these over-worked phrases stand out and they do trip me up.

tl:dr version: Clever idea, well executed. But not his best work. ( )

I loved Woodrell's WINTER'S BONE (and the film adaptation) but this one was kinda all over the place in its non-sequential presentation and a pretty big cast of characters. Even it's title, THE MAID'S VERSION, invites confusion, sounding too much like Margaret Atwood's much more famous THE HANDMAID'S TALE. The story centers around a 1929 dancehall explosion in a small town in Missouri that killed 42 people. The mystery of 'whodunit' lingers for decades, as we meet all the possible suspects and enter their sad, sordid lives. The 'maid' is Alma Dunahew, and we learn about a few generations of her poverty-plagued family and the better class family they work for. I was tempted more than once to just table this one as a bad bet, but it's a short book, so I finished it and it did begin to come together and got a little better. But only a little. Woodrell has written close to a dozen books, so maybe his more devoted fans will like this one. For me it was maybe an okay-plus.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )