I have really enjoyed some new books I have read this fall, and will write about some of them in the coming weeks. Thanks to all of you who have kept checking in here, as I have taken a longer hiatus than I anticipated.
You may know that Barbara Kingsolver lives in rural Appalachia. In Demon Copperhead, the newest of her books, she demonstrates her love for this often maligned region. But she also takes on some of the biggest problems the area faces, including poverty and opiod addiction.
Kingsolver admittedly patterns the book after David Copperfield, Dicken's novel treating poverty and abused children in Victorian England, and you will recognize the similarities of the two titles, and yes, the content of the book. That comparison helped me keep reading during the early pages of the book, as title character Damon is left orphaned and abused by the child welfare system. I was glad to know that Damon (nicknamed Demon) would turn out OK in the end, in spite of the hardships he endured.
The book was easily readable for me, even though it is thick, and the plot is full of action, sometimes graphically unpleasant. Obviously a skilled writer, Kingsolver has an attractive turn of phrase, which made her sentences and descriptions charming and even humorous.
I'll paste this description from amazon, to help you see if you will want to add Demon Copperhead to your reading list.
An Amazon Best Book of October 2022: Kingsolver takes a literary classic and makes it her own, peering into the dark corners not of Dickensian England, but of present day in the neglected hollers of Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains. Damon Fields, nicknamed Demon Copperhead, came into the world already behind the eight ball of life, and before long he’s in foster care placements that resemble work camps more than loving homes. Throughout this coming-of-age novel, the rug is constantly pulled out from under him but Demon has reserves of Olympian endurance that somehow, like the man in the arena, enables him to get back up again and again. His knees get dusty—he faces hunger, cruelty, loss, and is swept up in the tidal wave of OxyContin that overtakes his tiny county—but he never loses his love for the place that claims him as its own. Kingsolver’s writing is arresting and illuminating; in baring Demon’s soul on the page she gives voice and visibility to a place and its people where beauty and desperation live side by side.