Demon Copperhead is rich in every sense: rich in emotion, rich in setting, rich in the weight of the history it’s carrying.

For context, this is Barbara Kingsolver’s retelling of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, pulled out of nineteenth-century England and dropped into rural Virginia during the height of the opioid epidemic fueled by Purdue Pharma’s push of OxyContin. You don’t need to have read a word of Dickens to fall into this story. Familiarity with the original just adds a layer of fun on top, since you’ll catch yourself spotting which character maps to which and grinning every time a plot beat lines up with its source material.

Damon Fields, known to nearly everyone as Demon Copperhead, is a kid forced to grow up long before he’s had the chance to actually be a kid. Born into poverty in the Appalachian Mountains to a teenage mother battling addiction, Demon is only ten years old when his world starts collapsing around him: an addicted parent, an abusive stepfather, and a foster care system so broken it offers him more harm than help. From there, the book follows his long, winding fight to survive poverty, the child welfare system, the pull of drugs, opportunities that vanish before he can reach them, and, somewhere in the middle of all that wreckage, the search for love.

It’s a hefty book, but the length never dragged. I drowned in Demon’s world easily. Along the reading journey, I found myself in a heartbreaking and depressed moments and there were parts where I needed a break. By the time I finally reached the end, I felt two things at once: I missed the story already, and I was relieved to finally set down something this heavy.

My Favorite Bits

• “Live long enough, and all things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.”

• At the time, I thought my life couldn’t get any worse. Here’s some advice: Don’t ever think that.

• “It hit me pretty hard, how there’s no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning. People will keep on wanting what they want, and you’re on your own.”

• “All God’s children have to take a shit, but you’d never know it from the way they treat the ones who have to clean it up.”

• “I can still feel in my bones how being mad was the one thing holding me together.”

• We had the moon in the window to smile on us for a minute and tell us the world was ours. Because all the adults had gone off somewhere and left everything in our hands.

• What a pretty night, you’d say, if you’re an ignorant son of a bitch. instead of: There lies a field that eats man and children alive.

• That the longer you’ve gone hurting between fixes, the higher the odds that you’ll reach too hard for the starts next time. The first big rush of relief could be your last.

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Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Publication date: 18 October 2022
Number of pages: 560 pages

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