Barbara Kingsolver rarely writes short books. ‘Demon Copperhead’ is no exception. However, as is often the case, Kingsolver manages to hold the readers attention and propel the narrative forward beautifully.

Drawing on the structure and themes of David Copperfield, Kingsolver depicts the life of Damon/Demon. Set in what others cast as “red neck” America, Damon is born to a single mother in a trailer. Due to institutional poverty, stigma and the miss selling of opioid medication he is forced to deal with repeated bereavements, foster care, child labour, addiction, maltreatment and neglect. However, despite his nickname, Damon remains the positive hero of this tale.

Whilst there is a strong moral to this story, this doesn’t stop it from being a very enjoyable and absorbing read. Damon’s narration is strong and the other characters in the novel are really well depicted. The story becomes pacier in the second half, but the events from Damon’s childhood are so central to the novel that they need to be depicted in that level of detail, This is a book that is worth the commitment.

Demon Copperhead entered the world in a single trailer, born to a single mother who hadn’t a clue how to look after him - nor did she have the means. The southern Appalachian mountains of Virginia is where he took his first breath - a place of dire poverty, though most local folk were in the same boat, so it was pretty normal. Demon’s mum though had additional problems, and that meant even less of the basic needs for the two of them. Thank God for good neighbours.

I won’t go into the synopsis as this is a lengthy (over 600 pages) and eventful novel. However, this is a tale of love and the need for love, it’s about dreams and anger, hate and pain, and what really stands out is how the opioid crisis is responsible for many of those bad feelings, and demonstrates how it wrecks the lives that might otherwise have climbed out of that daily grinding poverty, perhaps realising those long held dreams and ambitions.

The journey for Demon Copperhead is long and eventful, (epic is the best way to describe it). The writing is so beautiful - exquisite even, but it takes the reader to places so dark, depressing and dangerous with its intimate detail, that you wonder why you find such beauty in it. But it’s there on every page, in every event and every crisis - harrowing yet uplifting. Has to be one of the standout books of the year - it is stunning!

“First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it.”

My thanks to Faber and Faber for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘Demon Copperhead’ by Barbara Kingsolver.

“First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it.” - ‘Demon Copperhead’ by Barbara Kingsolver.

I found this epic novel a phenomenal reading experience and it is one that I expect will be quickly hailed as a modern classic. As the title suggests it is a modern retelling of Charles Dickens’ ‘David Copperfield’ and addresses similar themes.

In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia,
Damon Fields is born to an addicted teenage mother. He quickly gains the nickname of Demon and Copperhead is added as it was his deceased father’s nickname: “one of Mom’s bad choices … was a guy called Copperhead. Supposedly he had the dark skin and light-green eyes of a Melungeon, and red hair that made you look twice.” About his nickname he quips: “You can’t deny, it’s got a power to it.”

Demon is blessed with plenty of charm, a quick wit, and a fighting spirit - all of which he will need in order to survive what life has in store for him. In this area of the country institutional poverty is the norm and the opiate crises is growing out of control.

There is no doubt this is a harrowing read though there are lighter moments. While I haven’t read ‘David Copperfield’, I had some awareness of its characters and themes.

In an essay following the main text titled ‘An Ethereal Visit’ Barbara Kingsolver talks about her stay at a house that had been Dickens’ seaside residence in Broadstairs and how the inspiration came for this novel in the middle of the night seated in the study where Dickens had written ‘David Copperfield’.

I expect that ‘Demon Copperhead’ will be featured in 2023 literary awards and also be popular in reading groups as it provides plenty of scope for discussion as well as being a well written and engaging read.

Highly recommended.

NO SPOILERS:

I may be a little biased here because Barbara Kingsolver is one of my favourite writers and having followed her on social media for a few years, I’d say she’s also one of my favourite people. But, in all honesty, it’s hard for me to write a review which does this book justice. It is simply perfect.

Demon Copperhead is a re-write of sorts of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, in which Dickens made clear the social disadvantage experienced by the poor of Victorian London. Barbara Kingsolver makes it clear that in contemporary America nothing has changed.

It is written in the first person, which I always like, and Demon’s voice never falters (of course it doesn’t, this is Barbara writing!) and I felt I came to know him completely. His hopes, his setbacks, his loves, his triumphs, heartbreak…all is laid very bare and is very raw. This is typically skilled writing and worth every word.

There are two things which really stick with me from this book; how hard it is to be seen and how hard to leave behind all you have ever known.

“No credit given for all the extra miles that take you nowhere.”

“People want somebody to kick around, I get that. But why us?”

It becomes so clear why and this book should be on every syllabus.

On a lighter note, Uriah Heep becomes U-Haul...blooming brilliant!

Thank you to NetGalley and Faber & Faber for the ARC of this book which I have voluntarily reviewed.

Demon Copperhead is a modern day retelling of David Copperfield, transplanted to rural Appalachia. I don’t think I’ve actually read David Copperfield, although I know the rough story, so Demon’s story kept me guessing even though many of the major plot points map on to the Dickens story pretty exactly.

Kingsolver really captured the rural poverty and hopeless nature of opioid addiction and this had the effect of humanising and highlighting the plight of the real people who are now living this reality in the USA, without ever feeling self-pitying or whiny.

A recommended (but long and satisfying) read, whether you know the Dickens story or not.

I loved Demon Copperhead. It’s supposed to be a reimagining / update of David Copperfield. I’ve never read the Dickens book so I have no idea how close, or not Demon Copperhead is to it. You’re better reading this marvellous book on its own merit. I loved this book. It’s so rich and full. I haven’t read anything so good in ages. I got completely sucked into Demon’s world and rooted for him from the first page. You spend a lot of time in Demon’s head and in his world as he strives to life a better life than his mother and step-father and juggles all the problems he’s thrown along the way. This is an epic read.

I can remember reading The Poisonwood Bible and being mesmerised by it. That was 24 years ago now. I had the same experience with Demon Copperhead and then some. It’s as near perfect as you can get for me. This re-telling of David Copperfield, set in an opioid hit town in the US is just incredible. It tells the story of a time, and while swathes of the US, through one boys eyes and is as personal and universal as the original. There aren’t enough superlatives. My book of the year.

This is a wonderful novel - tragic and comic and what you would expect from Kingsolver combined with a twist
of Dickens. Reading this novel again proves that over the centuries many things never change and the David and Demon both struggle through life with people to help and hinder along the way. It is an important novel in the context of the emerging awareness of the opioid crisis and as important a social commentary as was Dicken;s Copperfield in its day.

Deserves to become a classic - thank you NetGalley for the ARC

I loved this book, little realising that it was a modern rendition of David Copperfield.
This version is set in recent Virginia, an area of the world I know virtually nothing about.
I would normally say here that I loved Barbara Kingsolver's characters, all the plots and trials and tribulations of the main character, his friends and acquaintances.

I have to admit that I was shocked and disappointed, with myself, when reading the accompanying essay to this book and finding out that I had failed to associate the book and its characters with David Copperfield.

The above means that I now have to say that I loved the way that the author rethought and reworked the characters and actions into modern equivalents of the Dickens book and characters.

The author says that David Copperfield is her favourite Dickens book. I have to admit that I have a preference for a Tale of Two cities, although I can accept that David Copperfield was quite probably Dickens' best book.

I learnt so much from reading this book, and although as with Dickens it is a rare fish that can say that they enjoyed all of the book, with so many unpleasant things happening, I really enjoyed the overall story, and loved the book on the whole.

It would be fitting to think that this book could and should become a modern classic, perhaps read in all schools.

Many thanks to the author for a splendid story and my thanks to the publisher for an advanced copy for honest review.

I love Barbara Kingsolver's writing and her ability to inhabit characters and make them really matter to the reader. This was used to great effect in this book which was desperately sad, but the author managed to make me keep returning for the possibility of a glimmer of hope and maybe even redemption.
I hadn't realised until the end that it was a contemporary take on David Copperfield, which made me feel even more sad as, although the books are based in different countries in different centuries, their portrayal of generations of lost children hasn't really changed.
Thank you Ms Kingsolver, may those in power hear your truths and act on them
Thank you to netgalley and Faber and Faber for an advance copy of this book.

'Demon Copperhead' is a powerful and angry novel about the intergenerational trauma caused by the opioid crisis in rural Virginia. The narrator Damon (universally known as Demon) grows up in a trailer with his mother who is an addict until social services intervene send him to various foster homes where he experiences hardship, violence and neglect. His luck seems to change when his eccentric grandmother arranges for him to live with the coach of a leading high-school football team where Demon makes a name for himself as a footballer and discovers a talent for drawing, but a painkiller prescription after a football injury sparks his own battle with addiction.

As the title hints at, Kingsolver uses the structure of Dickens' 'David Copperfield' but updates the story to the modern-day Appalachian mountains. This works surprisingly well because of Dickens and Kingsolver's shared concern with poverty, social injustice and the mistreatment of children. As Demon says of Dickens, "seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat's ass. You'd think he was from round here." No prior knowledge of Dickens' novel is required but for those who do know it it there is an added enjoyment in seeing familiar characters in new guises - for instance, the Micawbers become Demon's foster parents the McCobbs, using their DSS payments to make ends meet, and the oleaginous Uriah Heap becomes U-Haul Pyles, the slimy assistant coach to the high-school football team.

Because of the subject matter, the novel is pretty hard-hitting; it is not just Demon and his mother who are affected by addiction but pretty much every family we meet. The first third or so of the novel is fairly relentless in its descriptions of the childhood traumas experienced by Demon; there is some respite from this in the middle but the final third also makes for deeply harrowing reading. In many ways, this novel feels like a companion to Patrick Radden Keefe's 'Empire of Pain' which exposes the role of the Sackler family and their company Purdue Pharma in the opioid epidemic. Here we see the devastating consequences laid bare in the ruined lives of whole generations.

What makes the novel bearable is Demon's narrative voice which is lively, witty and full of pluck even in the darkest moments. In addition, Kingsolver never allows us to forget how many characters care deeply for Demon - his grandmother Betsy Woodall and her brother Mr Dick, his teachers Mr Armstrong and Ms Annie, his fellow foster-child Tommy Waddles, and above all his childhood neighbours the Peggot family. Kingsolver has made it clear that she is writing about her own people in this novel. and her immense love for them blazes forth from every page.

This was not an easy read, in fact, it’s incredibly sad and thoroughly depressing. Inspired by the Dickens classic David Copperfield, it tells the story of a child born to a drug addict mother who then marries an abusive man resulting in her mistreated and vulnerable son, Damon being placed into the broken care system.

Damon’s harrowing story will stay with you long after you finish reading the book.

An easy 5⭐️ Thank you to NetGalley and Faber and Faber Ltd for the opportunity to read and review this brilliant novel.

This was such a difficult book for me to read. Although compulsive it was heart rending and hit upon too many triggers for me. The author pulls no punches describing how difficult life can be when surrounded by poverty and abuse. Am I glad that I read it ? Yes it reads like a classic .

This book was fantastic.

I felt for the flawed but fully fleshed out characters and was completely immersed in their journey. It was a long book but it still felt like it wasn't long enough as I wanted to continue to stay with Demon - and hopefully share his HEA.

Substance abuse is a trigger of mine so I struggled with some of the content, but the way it was handled made me view the circumstances around it differently and reconsider my opinion of people who use, so for that alone I would thanks the author, but even more so for the amazing story she gave us.

Starting this, I thought, does the world <i>really</i> need another version of <i>David Copperfield</i>? Am I really in the mood for depressing poverty-porn? And what does an internationally famous writer know about hunger, fear and desperation anyway?
Well, I was glad to be educated on all these questions. Firstly, turns out that Kingsolver is an Appalachian native, and puts this to good use in her depiction of the area and characters; you get to a stage where you can tell the difference between an author that has long first-hand experience of places and events, and one that has done a ton of research but cannot quite put themselves into the skins of those that lived it. Kingsolver has done the research, but backs it up with plenty of life-experience, and paints a vivid and convincing picture.
She also keeps well in with both Dickens' literary style and his mission to educate people on the social/economic disadvantages of certain strata in society. While often penetrating and gruesome, her protagonist Demon lifts the story by means of his personality, which has a certain hard-bitten sense of humour (or fatalism); the author also manages to get the tone of an older teen down quite well, and it is in his throwaway neologisms that much of the humour is conveyed. Kingsolver dances delicately on the line between documenting the horrors of addiction and crafting a good story, and I think she manages the balance with all the panache of her mentor.
She says at the end of the book that Dickens has been her inspiration for much of her career, as regards fighting for social justice, and I think she has done him proud with this story, which is highly entertaining as well as enraging.
<i>Demon Copperhead</i> has enough about it to be completely different to <i>David Copperfield</i> yet, sadly, it is unbelievable that we have evolved so little as a species since the mid-1800s that we still wilfully neglect and exploit the weakest in our societies.
Personally, I love that Kingsolver parses the larger historical, economic and political thinking behind the opioid crisis in Appalachia; but you can be of African descent, or First Nations, or any other marginalised part of society (obviously in every other country too) of any colour, religion or other "difference" which doesn't suit the capitalist elite and you will be demonised (pardon the pun) and exploited, and hounded to extinction - unless you start turning a profit for them.
The only minor issue with this book is that it is just the tiniest bit too long - but then, that is very much in keeping with the Dickensian style, and the story is quite good enough to carry the slight over-spill.

My thanks to Netgalley for the ARC of this book, I shall be recommending it to all my book club ladies.

An Appalachian David Copperfield. Tragic and funny voice, Demon Copperfield tells us the story of a doomed generation. Brilliant and eye opening.

Barbara Kingsolver’s reworking of David Copperfield as a tale for our times is a masterful portrayal of what it can be like for a child to be born and grow up amongst the poorest and most marginalised in America today. Children who are labelled as society’s dregs and treated as if they are in some way lesser beings because their clothes are ragged and they are always hungry.

Damon Fields, nicknamed Demon Copperhead (for his red hair), is a child born to a single teenage mother living in a trailer, his father dead before his birth, in Lee County in the Virginian Appalachians. While his mother struggles with drug addiction and is in and out of rehab, Demon is also cared for by the kindly Peggot family next door, grandparents bringing up their own grandson whose mother is in prison. He learns to love the wild forests, to hunt and fish and what it’s feels like to be part of a large family. However, when he is ten, Demon’s world really falls apart when his mother marries an abusive man with no interest in raising a child. This is the start of a downhill spiral for Demon that leads to the nightmare of foster care, where he is expected to work to earn his keep, never given enough to eat or provided with bigger clothing as he grows. After he hits his lowest point, a change in fortune will find him in a better place but, with a baggage of neglect, abuse and poverty, he’s not equipped to weather the storms still to come and is in danger of repeating the cycle of addiction and poverty.

However, even at his lowest point Demon never loses his will to survive or to see the best in people. His ability to draw and conjure up superheros with the power to save the weak and downtrodden is his richest possession and along with his sense of humour and intelligence keeps him going in the toughest of times. This is a long book and I did find it slow down in the latter half when Kingsolver is fully laying out the causes and effects of the opiod crisis in America, particularly in marginalised populations, such as in poor rural areas where there is high unemployment and people are told they are worthless. However, sad and depressing Demon’s story is, it felt very real and hopefully will lead to better understanding of what it is to be caught up in poverty through no fault of your own, poorly educated and without hope and told you are worthless, with the lure of drugs one way to make it all go away for a while. Demon is a character I will not easily forget in this insightful and provocative novel.

A superb, at times harrowing read narrated by Damon, following his childhood. A sweeping social commentary covering the care system, grinding poverty and drug addictions. Deeply moving but told with a wry conversational tone this book will stay with you long after you've finished. My favourite read this year.

Wonderful, classic Kingsolver in that it gently weaves the big issues (here it's opioid over-prescription and the 'left behind sections dividing American society) into a gripping roller-coaster of a story. Loosely based on Dickens' David Copperfield, it is narrated by a poor child from a trailer park in rural Virginia. Initially looked after by neighbours, later disastrously fostered and abused, little wonder he makes a lot of bad
choices through his own inexperience.
It's funny, poignant, page-turning dramatic, and eventually uplifting as the decent humans on the fringe of
his life, who have tried in their humble way to offer him better choices and foster his talents, see him move into adulthood with more options than he ever imagined.
A picture of rural America that pulls you in and stays with you. Can't recommend it highly enough.

The famed author of The Poisonwood Bible returns with an Appalachian story inspired by the Dickens classic David Copperfield. In a single-wide trailer, the protagonist is born to a teenaged single mother, bereft of any wealth apart from his late father’s good looks and scrappy talent for staying alive. As the novel follows his life, he moves through foster care, takes jobs that break child labor laws, tries to learn in crumbling schools, and runs into painful addictions familiar to anyone with firsthand knowledge of the opioid crisis. Throughout, the protagonist reflects on his own invisibility in a culture with a waning interest in rural life.

As the reader, you are constantly in awe as you watch Demon brave the dangers of foster care, child labour, drug addiction during an opioid epidemic, poverty and starvation.Demon’s story is plagued with tragedies, some scenes so unbearably sad and harrowing one cannot imagine how someone as young as he could keep going. But he talks through his experiences to the reader in a conversational manner, bringing a mischievous magnetism and wily sense of humour that warms your heart and imprints the character in your brain long after putting down the book. He is a hero worth rooting for.