Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a culture that’s been largely abandoned. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. As Kingsolver recently told The New York Times, this produced “a generation of kids who’ve had their lives torn apart.”ĭemon Copperhead spins the tale of a boy born to a teenaged mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and red hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. It’s Kingsolver’s 17th novel in some three decades, and in writing it, she says she wanted to counter some of the condescension and downright snobbery directed at the region in which she was born and still lives, an area whose people, she believes, have been exploited for generations, most recently by pharmaceutical companies who targeted Appalachian residents and created the current opioid crisis. Kingsolver conceived the idea while on a visit to Dickens’s historic seaside English retreat and actually started writing Demon Copperhead at Dickens’s own desk. Demon Copperhead re-envisions the Charles Dickens classic David Copperfield, setting it in modern-day Appalachia.
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