The Maid's Version: A Novel by Daniel Woodrell

The Maid's Version: A Novel by Daniel Woodrell - 164 pages

The Maid's Version is a historical fiction novel loosely based on a real explosion at the local dance hall in West Plains, Missouri (the fictionalized setting is West Table, Missouri).  Alma Degeer Dunahew' is the main character the story is framed through, as she lost her sister in the fire and know more about the incident than she let on back then.  The full story is revealed to her grandson in her waning years.

I was not too thrilled with the book and I cannot really fully explain why.  It was more the writing style than the content.  The chapters moved back and forth in time and some chapters detoured from the main storyline to present what happened to others who were maimed or perished not otherwise mentioned.

The Maid's Version by Daniel Woodrell

The Maid's Version by Daniel Woodrell --- 164 pages

This is a small gem of a book, based upon a true event, a dance hall fire that devastated the town of West Plain MO in 1929, in which a number of the town's young people perished, and the cause of the fire has never been satisfactorily explained in all the years since.

Woodrell's family has been resident in the area for many years, and his grandmother did indeed work as a maid for a prominent family there at the time of the fire. However Woodrell is not writing a true crime story, but using the event as the starting point for his own tale of the furies unleashed by passion, betrayal, madness and remorse, as unrelenting as any tragedy of Euripedes or Shakespeare.

Click HERE to watch an interview with the author.