Demon Copperhead

I've never read David Copperfield and I feel like I missed out on some of the inevitable book nerd glee recognizing character parallels between the two. Nonetheless, my stunning gap in the literary canon hardly prevented me from enjoying this modern day retelling set in Appalachia

Damon Fields, otherwise known as Demon Copperhead, is the singular voice carrying us through this tale from his en caul birth onto the gritty vinyl flooring of a Lee County, Virginia mobile home, to his pinballing through the foster care system, eventual opioid addiction and otherwise bleak, unyieldingly horrible time that can barely be considered a childhood.

It's one hell of a story told from the wry eye of Demon who is at turns funny, fiercely proud, and sharp. He knows what the world thinks of him and his ilk. How he's always been dismissed as a redneck, white trash, dumbass hillbilly. But he's here to tell you he's just a product of a system that has needed to denigrate him and his people in order to take advantage of them. To extract value from the land on the backs of its people, to bolster profits for big Pharma consequences be damned, to dismiss them all as entirely unimportant. Kingsolver's got a fierce agenda, but in the mouth of Demon it steps off its soapbox and avoids being preachy at the expense of story.

The travails Demon endures are breathtaking without devolving into maudlin trauma porn. In Kingsolver's hands Demon's life is one cliffhanger after another as she propels this Appalachian epic forward. It's a hell of a tale told well and worth telling.