Demon Copperhead
By Barbara Kingsolver
- Genre
- Literary Fiction
- Publisher
- Harper (HarperCollins)
- Publication year
- 2022
- ISBN
- 9780063251922
Demon Copperhead transposes Charles Dickens's David Copperfield to contemporary Appalachia, following a boy born to a teenage mother in the mountains of southern Virginia as he moves through foster care, child labour, high-school football and addiction. Barbara Kingsolver uses the coming-of-age...
Barbara Kingsolver borrows the scaffolding of David Copperfield and rebuilds it in the mountains of southern Appalachia, where a bright, wisecracking boy narrates his own hard passage through foster homes, hunger and the pharmaceutical devastation of his region. The Dickensian inheritance is worn lightly; what carries the novel is Demon's voice - furious, funny and clear-eyed - refusing both pity and despair as he names the forces arrayed against children like him. Kingsolver writes the opioid epidemic not as an issue but as weather, the atmosphere a whole community is forced to breathe, and she does so without reducing her characters to case studies. The result is a big, propulsive, socially engaged novel in the nineteenth-century tradition, updated for a landscape too often caricatured or ignored. Readers who want fiction that combines momentum with moral seriousness will be held from the first page. It is an angry, tender book that argues, persuasively, for the dignity of the overlooked.