"Modern adaptation of David Copperfield set in Virginia, the storyline follows protagonist Damon Fields, nicknamed Demon Copperhead for his bright red hair, from birth to around age twenty-one. His life is full of struggles. Growing up in poverty in the 1990s-2000s, he is born to a drug-addicted mother, who tries to get clean but relapses. His stepfather is abusive. Luckily his neighbors, the Peggots, are good to him and try to fill in the gaps when his mother goes into rehab. His life is a continuous series of turns of fortune. He meets both good-hearted people and nefarious but charismatic scoundrels.

Demon tells his story in first person, looking back on his youthful years, using wry wit and colorful language. The plot is fueled by battles with addictions, the pitfalls of foster care, the hardships of poverty, and indictments of corporate greed that has taken a large toll on the Appalachian region (coal, tobacco, Big Pharma). It is also a story of typical teenage coming-of-age dilemmas, friendships, and a “found family� that provides an uplifting interlude.

There are many admirable aspects. Demon is a sympathetic character, and he takes us on an emotional rollercoaster. I felt deeply for this child. The primary drawback is that occasionally the message gets a little too obvious and over-explained, but this is the exception. In this book the author has taken a large step forward in avoiding the soapbox. Perhaps it is partially due to the use of a story that parallels one we know well, David Copperfield. It is not absolutely necessary to have read Dickens’s classic, but I think it adds to the enjoyment. This is an impressive work."

"Kingsolver knocks this one out of the park and then some. I've very much enjoyed and admired her previous works including The Lacuna, Unsheltered and Flight Behaviour. Demon Copperhead though is on a whole different level. It's brilliant.

Here I must admit that Dickens' David Copperfield is among my all time favourite novels. I first read it in high school, have returned to it many times; it's something of a literary touchstone and comfort for me. David Copperfield is literature at its finest: the voice; its wonderful world of characters (the shades and voices that Dickens paints with in Copperfield for me is at his very best); the social setting and political critique of poverty and class; sympathetic vision for the complexity of being human. With Demon Copperhead Kingsolver pays homage to and draws from the wellspring of that tradition of social realism and gives it her very own trajectory. Set in rural Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is narrated by Damon Fields, a boy and then young man dealing with a life of poverty and struggle in the midst of the opioid epidemic that devastates lives and communities. The social conscience at the heart of this novel is Dickensian through its grounding in the lives of the characters, especially Damon (known as Demon), and those around him.

There are so many parallels and allusions to David Copperfield that I don't know where to start in terms of pointing these out and have therefore decided mostly not to. These have been identified in so many other reviews. Worth noting though is how Kingsolver uses some of these parallels to develop her own critique of Dickens' milieu. For example, a young woman in the book whose central to Demon's life, Angus, definitely parallels David Copperfield's "good angel", Agnes Wickfield, but Angus is an independent spirit and developed to be no ones 'Victorian angel'. This is commented on insightfully in this The Guardian review:



In many ways Kingsolver's critique of USA society and system that enables the poverty and addictions is far more nuanced and astute than Dickens' portrayal of David as a heroic individual making his way through and out of such povety. Demon Copperhead depicts the often inescapable constraint that such structures and forces have on peoples' lives as they struggle to just hold on (or not). There's also a telling critique directed at some of the forces shaping Trumpian America, which not only have created the crippling poverty and loss of livelihood and hope for many living in these regions of USA, but also how so many others living their more privileged lives misunderstand or fail to grapple with how this is experienced in terms of identity and community (the despised deplorables).

Demon Copperhead is good old fashion novelistic social realism at its finest and demonstrates the power this literary form still has to help us imagine the lives of those around us and hopefully provide an expanded shared social imagination. I will be surprised if another work this year surpasses the experience of Demon's voice and the quality wiriting and narrative structure that sustains and develops it. Kingsolver has given us close to a contemporary literary masterpiece.

But at the end is there an issue with how Demon finds redemption and a way out as it were (with some help from imperfect friends and mentors along the way). His own form of artistic expression (comic book writing and art) seems to be a life raft out of the dead-end of addiction and poverty. This review perceptively poses is this a kind of delusion that perhaps limits Kingsolver's ending (). Good question. It's also a question for this sprawling epic of a social realist novel. Is such a form still of literary merit and indeed perhaps more importantly is the proposition that it might make a difference in the world also a kind of comforting delusion? With her knowing and trenchant exposure of the social forces that constrain and exploit Kingsolver is far from oblivious to such difficulties. But she holds out a glow, an ember of hope, that I think she gestures perhaps can be flamed through characters like Demon and pages such as this work. It's very much up to we the readers if this ends up as delusion.

Towards the conclusion Demon reflects thinking about Angus and others in his life:

"I've tried in this telling, time and again, to pinpoit the moment where everything starts to fall apart. Everything, meaning me. But there's also the opposite, where some little nut cracks open inside you and a trees starts to grow. Even harder to nail. Because that thing's going to be growing a long time before you notice. Years maybe. Then one day you say, Huh, that little crack between my ears has turned into this whole damn tree of wonderful.

It had mainly fallen to Angus over the years to crack some of the harder nuts of Demon, due to her always being around and putting up with me... But the one you're never going to guess: Tommy. Going all the way back to woeful Tommy in the paper office pulling his hair, crushed by the news of us hillfolk being the kicked dogs of America. Leading to the shocking demite of Stumpy Fidles, the pencil thrust in challenge: Let's see you do better. We were just a couple of time-hardened foster boys shooting the shit. What good could ever come of that? You wait".

Here Kingsolver is again gesturing at the salvatory power of creative expression as Tommy, a fellow orphan, keeps pulling Demon back to his creative expression and social critique through their graphic narratives.

Demon Copperfield is a "whole damn tree of wonderful" all of its own. The only elements missing from this in terms of a Dickensian homage are the comic timing and sensibility in the charactersiation that serves to sharpen even more Dickens political critique. When Kingsolver attempts this it tends to not quite work or end up with some moments of weakened caricature."

"Demon Copperhead is said to be inspired by David Copperfield, a masterpiece I read a couple of years ago. I most definitely can see that inspiration in Kingsolver’s novel. I would be hesitant, however, to make any further comparisons because for me that puts a contemporary novel on shaky ground when setting it next to a classic, beloved book. I can somehow forgive Charles Dickens for his verbosity. After all, that was the vogue back in his day. David Copperfield was a series of installments, stretched out over a period of time. He didn’t get paid by the word but by installment; still, he had a lot of mouths to feed. Barbara Kingsolver, on the other hand, could have done with a lot less, and I would have been a much happier reader for it. That’s not to say that her points are less important than Dickens� themes. She absolutely had good reason to share what she did here.

“That November it was still a shiny new thing. OxyContin, God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself. For every football player with some of this or that torn up, and the whole world riding on his getting back in the game. This was our deliverance. The tree was shaken and yes, we did eat of the apple.�

But this isn’t only about drugs and pharmaceutical companies and shady doctors taking advantage of a whole group of people. It’s also about the foster care system and how it fails those most in need of protection. It’s about the long reach of the coal mine owners and how their power reverberated across the years, affecting everything in these individual’s lives from wages to education to property and more. Someone should be held accountable, and that’s where I find Kingsolver’s work to be admirable, without a doubt. However, I still couldn’t get the author out of my head while reading this story - despite the fact it was supposedly told through a young boy-turned-young adult’s point of view. I’ve read and loved some of Kingsolver’s earlier work but have had difficulty with more of her “recent� work for the same reason. If I sense the writer sitting next to me on the couch while I read, I get a little cranky. I would much rather feel like his or her characters are having a nice heart to heart with me instead. And that brings me to another niggle - Demon’s “voice� throughout the book. I just couldn’t jibe with it. It got on my nerves A LOT!

“If a mother is lying in her own piss and pill bottles while they’re slapping the kid she’s shunted out, telling him to look alive: likely the bastard is doomed. Kid born to the junkie is a junkie. He’ll grow up to be everything you don’t want to know, the rotten teeth and dead-zone eyes, the nuisance of locking up your tools in the garage so they don’t walk off, the rent-by-the-week motel squatting well back from the scenic highway.�

I don’t mind gritty but what I couldn’t quite wrap my head around was who on earth is speaking these words? Supposedly, this is Demon as a young boy at the start of the story (the above passage occurs on page 2). Is this a super savvy kid speaking? Or is it Demon as an old man looking back and narrating? Or is it Kingsolver trying really hard to create a voice she feels is authentic? I don’t know, honestly. But it happened over and over again to me throughout the 500+ pages. It's like nails on a chalkboard!

Okay, I’ll lay off the complaining now. This is, after all, a 3-star book in my mind so there has to be another good thing or two, right?! What I loved most were the strong women in Demon’s life. Without them, I’m afraid to imagine Demon’s fate. In these Appalachia stories, I’ve often found that the women are the ones holding down the fort. It’s their strength and perseverance in the face of adversity that forms a safety net for those they care for most. And I can see where these women equate to those in Dickens� story as well. This makes for a bit of fun, but you surely don’t need to read his book to understand this one. It just adds another level perhaps. There’s even a passage in here where Demon nods to that famous work.

“I had to do the harder English, which was a time suck, reading books. Some of them though, I finished without meaning to� Likewise the Charles Dickens one, seriously older 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 around here.�

I’ll say that this is an important topic to explore. Personally, it would work better if it had been edited more thoroughly. Yes, a shorter story can still make a huge impact. I also think a non-fiction piece on the opioid crisis would be a lot more effective for me. I know they are out there, and I will explore that option more thoroughly. Now, would I have loved this more if Richard Armitage had been reading it to me as he did David Copperfield? Damn straight I would have!! He could have read another 500 pages of this one to me and I’d have been content.

“It hit me pretty hard, how there’s no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning.�
"