Set in the mountains of Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenage single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through it all, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities. ( )

Damon Woodall is the narrator of the story of his life from his birth to a drug addicted mother to his reconnection with his “adoptive” sister Angus (Agnes).
Demon and all of his relatives and neighbours are the former miners, backwoods folks of Appalachia who scrape by on social assistance, part time labour, back yard gardens, living off the land and the kindness of neighbours. They are the the rural poor and the butt of many suburban jokes.
Demon’s mother dies of an overdose and he is placed in foster care as an 11 year old.
What saves him is his likability, intelligence, hard work, drawing skills and his empathy for others. Along the way he tracks down his paternal grandmother and she helps with her connections to get him settled with a high school football coach and his daughter Angus. He becomes a football star and local celebrity but his girlfriend Cori is a bad influence.
Demon’s character is so well described, his interactions with family and friends show his maturity, sensitivity, gratitude, intelligence and pain.
I’ve heard the book described a “trauma porn”. Not sure this is fair as I believe the novel accurately describes the opioid crisis and its impacts on rural citizens.
I think you will love or hate this book. ( )

Holy crap - don't mind me, over here in the corner, sobbing.

This story is SO hard and so good. You will be agonizing with and rooting for Damon / "Demon" for all 548 pages. ( )

Sometimes a book draws you in so thoroughly that when you finish, you feel bereft. The first analogy that came to mind was going into withdrawal, rejected as beyond tactless. Kingsolver takes the basic outline of [David Copperfield] and brings it forward to western Virginia. Demon (Damon) is born to a 16 year old, herself brought up in foster care. The boyfriend was a young man with potential but he dies in a stupid accident at a dangerous waterfall before Demon is born. The years of the story cover 11 to somewhere around 18 plus and if you've read Copperfield you know there will be many downs before there is a slow steady rising. Kingsolver takes the reader on a tour of what it is like to grow up poor and ignored and even ridiculed by the rest of the country, and through Demon you experience the neglect of the (poorly paid) DSS supervisors, of the difficulty in finding good foster care, of the problem of who to believe, of despair and chronic pain leading to addiction (Kingsolver sets the novel so that it coincides with the oxycontin debacle with which we are still living), the rapacity of pharma--targeting these vulnerable populations and so on), the irony/tragedy of the already vulnerable preying on the even more vulnerable (foster parents who put Demon to work, take his money to pay their rent . . . have him sleep in the laundry room, don't feed him). All that would feel unbearably preachy if it weren't for Demon himself. He's just . . . somehow or other . . . born whole, born decent, born smart and self aware and funny. He goes wayyyy down but he will survive and thrive. And it works. Don't miss out! *****

This book has appeared on many ‘best of 2022’ lists, 8 out of the 16 I collected in this post, but it wasn’t for me.

I don’t know the story of David Copperfield although I do know a few things about Dicken’s writing: a focus on social injustice; poverty and the effects on children and the black holes in society that allow this to happen. As a writer, I know he likes to play with names such as Mr Feziwig and Bayham Badger and I also know that David Copperfield is narrated by Davy and spans his life starting with when he was born.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

First line of David Copperfield
And so it is for Demon Copperhead and one of the questions that you want to answer as you start the book. Demon is a child who is failed by everybody – his parents, child social services, foster carers, sporting coaches and other children and from an early time only had himself and his friend Maggot to rely upon. How his friend became known to be Maggot is most definitely worthy of Dickens himself. This is also a story of the massive drug problem with OxyContin and Fentanyl amongst others and how they have ravaged society particularly in Appalachia where this book is set.

I did enjoy Kingsolver’s description of Appalachia especially in the early part of the book where Demon is a relatively carefree child roaming the land around him with his friend, playing in the creeks, knowing the mud at the bottom as the best mud anywhere and having his neighbours, the Peggots, as a safe place to go when it all got too much.

The story is narrated by Demon and he is a lively, optimistic narrator that prevents this book becoming a drudge of one failure after another – and it is a long book. There are parts that are almost too painful to read: the social workers who took Demon to the foster carer’s farm and argued over who should take him in there because they were scared was very difficult as they knew this was child abuse in terms of care and slave labour but they still handed him over. Very few institutions come out of this book well.

You are left with hope at the end of the book but it takes a very long time to get there. I didn’t enjoy it and although I admire the idea of reworking David Copperfield, I do wonder if you can get too hung up on how this book links with that one rather than concentrating on what Kingsolver is writing about and the quality of what she has done as a standalone novel. ( )