This is a heck of a good book. It’s brilliant actually, if you consider language and character development and themes etc.  Except for Unsheltered (2018). I’ve followed Barbara Kingsolver’s writing career from The Bean Trees in 1992.  Imo, until now, The Poisonwood Bible was the best of the lot.  

Demon Copperhead 
by Barbare Kingsolver
2022  (896 pages)
Reaed by Charlie Thurston 21h 3m
Rating: 9.5 / contemporary fiction

But Demon (real name Damon) Copperhead  is the better book – maybe – by a hair. It’s a Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age tale, of a red-haired boy growing up as the only child of a poverty-stricken teenage mother in a single-wide shack of a trailer in the back hills of western Virginia.  Demon is smart, funny, and insightful  and it’s his 1st person story told at a much later time than when he lives it; it’s from the point of view of an adult. 

Their borrowed trailer is on a little patch of land near friendly folks in far Lee County, Virginia.  Demon enjoys playing with the boy next door who might have some problems with his burgeoning gayness/ transexuality. David’s dad is deceased by several years and his mom is an addict who tries her best by finding herself a husband after which there’s abuse added to the misery. Mom dies and Demon is put into the state system of foster homes and his own cycle of poverty.  The old neighbors from when Mom was alive remain friends and keep in very close touch as Demon moves from situation to situation. That’s how he grows up, discovering that he has talents for drawing and football and that he likes girls.  Somehow Kingsolver is enough of a writer to make this story page-turning.  

But what’s happened is that Kingsolver has taken the story of David Copperfield (by Charles Dickens, 1850) and dressed him in the fashioning him into the Demon Copperhead of 21st century rural poverty and foster homes of Appalachia in the 21st century.  Specifically this is western Virgina where the opioid crisis is going full bore and has touched the lives of almost everyone.   

Kingsolver is known for her concern for social and human issues so has pointed the plots of her books in that direction. She’s written about colonialism in Africa, climate change in Virginia, poverty in Arizona, and the opioid crisis in the Appalachia.    

It’s long but the time flew by and I’m very glad I took the time to read this.