This Pulitzer prize-winning tome had a chokehold over me and I can honestly say — Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver is the best work of fiction I’ve read in years. Inspired by Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, the latter was written from his own experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society.
Demon Copperfield, on the other hand, is set in the mountains of southern Appalachia and tells the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival.
Relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.
This is the story of an irrepressible boy nobody wants, but readers will love. Trust.
