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![Demon Copperhead: A Novel by [Barbara Kingsolver]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51tuSHomOqL._SY346_.jpg)
Demon Copperhead: A Novel Kindle Edition
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A NEW YORK TIMES "TEN BEST BOOKS OF 2022"
An Oprah’s Book Club Selection • An Instant New York Times Bestseller • An Instant Wall Street Journal Bestseller • A #1 Washington Post Bestseller
"Demon is a voice for the ages—akin to Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield—only even more resilient.” —Beth Macy, author of Dopesick
"May be the best novel of 2022. . . . Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, this is the story of an irrepressible boy nobody wants, but readers will love.” (Ron Charles, Washington Post)
From the acclaimed author of The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees, a brilliant novel that enthralls, compels, and captures the heart as it evokes a young hero’s unforgettable journey to maturity
Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead 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 all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.
Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper
- Publication dateOctober 18, 2022
- File size4305 KB
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Editorial Reviews
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Review
A contemporaneous David Copperfield.
-- "Library Journal"Demon's fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it...An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)" --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.Review
"Demon is a voice for the ages—akin to Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield—only even more resilient. I’m crazy about this book, which parses the epidemic in a beautiful and intimate new way. I think it’s her best.” — Beth Macy, author of Dopesick
“An Appalachian David Copperfield...Demon Copperhead reimagines Dickens’s story in a modern-day rural America contending with poverty and opioid addiction...Kingsolver and Dickens overlap: both of them exuberant writers of social novels with a strong political message and a concern for the lower classes…Kingsolver’s novel sweeps you along just as powerfully as the original does…..” — New York Times
“If you’re familiar with the Charles Dickens classic, you’ll follow the story’s beats and chuckle….What keeps you turning the pages is the knowledge that Demon has a future. The novel ends on a note of hope...not every fate is decided by the circumstances of one’s birth.” — Associated Press
"There’s really nothing like being immersed in a Kingsolver novel….Damon [is Kingsolver’s] bravest, most ambitious creation yet." — Los Angeles Times
“An epic…brimming with vitality and outrage….the rare 560-page book you wish would never end.”
— People "Book of the Week"!
“With its bold reversals of fate and flamboyant cast, this is storytelling on a grand scale….As Demon discovers, owning his story – every part of it – and finding a way to tell it is how he’ll wrest some control over his life. And what a story it is: acute, impassioned, heartbreakingly evocative, told by a narrator who’s a product of multiple failed systems, yes, but also of a deep rural landscape with its own sustaining traditions.” — The Guardian
“An extraordinary new novel....Much like Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain or Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Kingsolver’s epic is narrated by a self-professed screwup with a heart of gold...chock-full of cinematic twists and turns. It’s a book that demands we start paying attention to — and embracing — a long-ignored community and its people." — San Francisco Chronicle
“A brilliant story…A page turner and Kingsolver’s best novel by far…. Kingsolver has some of Mark Twain in her, along with 21st-century gifts of her own. More than ever, she is our literary mirror and window. May this novel be widely read and championed.” — Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Kingsolver's new novel is her best in years...The character of Damon is right up there with the best classic orphans of literatre. Believe me: you will root for this lost boy." — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“In Demon Copperhead…Kingsolver channels the voice of a disenfranchised boy lost in the failures of our social system. It's a testament to her storytelling mastery that this novel also illustrates how deeply intertwined our attitudes about nature are with our collective destiny. As always, her purpose is to make us think about the ways we all must look out for each other.” — Arizona Republic
“Absorbing….Readers see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath Demon’s self-protective exterior…. Emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it…. An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.” — Kirkus Review (Starred Review)
“Kingsolver’s capacious, ingenious, wrenching, and funny survivor’s tale is a virtuoso present-day variation on Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield….Kingsolver’s tour de force is a serpentine, hard-striking tale of profound dimension and resonance.” — Booklist (Starred Review)
“A deeply evocative story…Kingsolver’s account of the opioid epidemic and its impact on the social fabric of Appalachia is drawn to heartbreaking effect. This is a powerful story, both brilliant in its many social messages regarding foster care, child hunger, and rural struggles, and breathless in its delivery.” — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
“Kingsolver brings a notably different energy from her previous work to Demon Copperhead…through a tremendous narrative voice, one so sharp and fresh as to overwhelm the reader’s senses….Demon’s spirit comes through, and it is haunting. It’s the reason the pages keep turning….Kingsolver has made this story her own, and what a joy it is to slip into this world and inhabit it, even with all its challenges.” — BookPage
“Demon Copperhead is a propulsive reading experience, energetic and funny while still conveying Kingsolver’s fury at the institutions that have let her community down.” — Slate
“You’ll be enthralled by [Demon’s] voice, simultaneously hilarious and wise, as he illuminates life in rural America…..this is the ideal late-fall read to sink your teeth into.”
— Real Simple
“A dazzling novel….a lyrical re-dreaming of Dickens’s David Copperfield. The social injustices of Victorian England have been transplanted, with spellbinding success, to modern-day Appalachia…populated by America’s rural white underclass and now ravaged by the opioid crisis…Kingsolver maintains an astonishing level of energy and intensity….This novel is surely a highpoint of Kingsolver’s long career and a strong early candidate for next year's Booker Prize.” — Times Literary Supplement
“A riveting, epic tale…[Kingsolver’s] exquisite writing takes a wrenching story and makes it worthwhile… Kingsolver has given us a superb novel.” — Christian Science Monitor
“…a heartrending, probing and ultimately hopeful tale about a young boy’s journey from devastation to survival….It’s hard to ascertain which is more brilliant, Kingsolver’s skill in modernizing Dickens’ narrative or the voice she gives to the privations and adversities facing the land and people she so dearly loves.” — Atlanta Journal-Constitution
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.About the Author
Barbara Kingsolver is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, and The Bean Trees, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. Her work of narrative nonfiction is the influential bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts, as well as the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.Product details
- ASIN : B09QMHZ53K
- Publisher : Harper (October 18, 2022)
- Publication date : October 18, 2022
- Language : English
- File size : 4305 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 556 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #42 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Barbara Kingsolver grew up in rural Kentucky and earned degrees in biology from DePauw University and the University of Arizona before becoming a freelance writer and author. At various times in life she has lived in England, France, and the Canary Islands, and has worked in Europe, Africa, Asia, Mexico, and South America. She spent two decades in Tucson, Arizona, before moving to southwestern Virginia where she currently resides.
Her fifteen books include short stories, essay collections, poetry, and seven novels. In the first decade of the new millennium, following her well-known work The Poisonwood Bible, she published two novels (prior to this one) and three non-fiction books including Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a narrative of her family’s locavore year that helped launch a modern transition in America’s food culture. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than two dozen languages, and has been adopted into the core literature curriculum in high schools and colleges throughout the nation.
Kingsolver was named one the most important writers of the 20th Century by Writers Digest. In 2000 she received the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts. Critical acclaim for her books includes multiple awards from the American Booksellers Association and the American Library Association, among many others. The Poisonwood Bible was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Orange Prize, and won the national book award of South Africa, before being named an Oprah Book Club selection. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle won numerous prizes including the James Beard award. The Lacuna won Britain’s prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction in 2010, and last year she was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work.
In 1998, Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize for fiction, the nation’s largest prize for an unpublished first novel, which has helped to establish the careers of more than a half dozen new literary voices. Through a recent agreement the prize has now become the PEN / Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.
Barbara has two daughters, Camille and Lily. Her husband, Steven Hopp, teaches environmental studies. Since June 2004, Barbara and her family have lived on a farm in southern Appalachia, where they raise an extensive vegetable garden and Icelandic sheep.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2023
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And this, I say, is absolutely fine! If you're going to steal, by all means, steal from the best! I am completely in earnest about that. Good stories get retold, and they should. West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet in new clothes, and it is brilliant! The story of Noah's flood was stolen from the Sumerians (Gilgamesh). The tradition of stealing stories goes back as far as story-telling. Of course, it is not really stealing if you're honest about it.
Given what I've just told you, you might expect Demon Copperhead to be a lot like David Copperfield. It is not. Kingsolver transplants Copperfield to Lee County, Virginia, at the height of the oxycodone crisis. Lee County is a real place. Since the Civil War, Virginia has been an oddly-shaped state that thrusts a sharply pointed spear west into the Appalachian mountains. Lee County is the point of that spear. Kingsolver's biography says she grew up in nearby Kentucky. She knows this country and its people.
Victorian London was grim, but Lee County is arguably grimmer. In my memory David Copperfield is often light-hearted -- Dickens finds things to laugh at. There is very little to laugh at in Demon Copperhead. The child poverty Dickens wrote about is arguably worse in Kingsolver's Lee County. One reason for that is drugs. Victorian London had similar problems: alcoholism and laudanum, but the menu of chemicals was certainly smaller than it is in Kingsolver's Lee County. It makes a grim, grim new way to trap kids in grinding poverty.
Kingsolver has an agenda in Demon Copperhead. She wants us to stop laughing at Appalachia.
"There’s this thing that happens, let’s say at school where a bunch of guys are in the bathroom, at the urinal, laughing about some jerk that made a fool of himself in gym. You’re all basically nice guys, right? You know right from wrong, and would not in a million years be brutal to the poor guy’s face. And then it happens: the jerk was in the toilet stall. He comes out of the stall with this look. He heard everything. And you realize you’re not really that nice of a guy. This is what I would say if I could, to all smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes: We are right here in the stall. We can actually hear you."
(I cleaned up the language in that quote a bit, in order to include it in an Amazon review.)
Now, to be honest, I am not entirely persuaded. I mean, I agree that it is wrong to ridicule country folks. (That's not even a concession for me, since I am one myself.) But NO ONE gets immunity from being ridiculed by folks who think they're smarter than you. *Everyone* gets ridiculed for being different. If you've never heard Country boys making fun of college boys and liberals and Democrats you haven't been listening. Appalachia bears some unique burdens, but the burden of being made fun of is not one.
One thing I like about her is that although she could clearly continue to have a guaranteed audience by settling into a particular style or theme, she continues to challenge herself by trying new things, and patterning this work after one of the most famous books by one of the most famous authors in history was certainly a bold choice, but it really worked out.
It's been a LONG time since I read David Copperfield, so I read the Wikipedia plot summary to refresh my memory. It's not clear how important that is, since the book certainly stands on its own without any knowledge of the original work, but knowing the Dickens book definitely adds a layer of enjoyment, not to mention a bit of comfort, since you know more or less how the story is going in the end.
That's not to say this is a scene for scene copy of the original. A lot of the names are similar - Uriah Heep becoming U Haul Pyles being the best! - and if follows the original story in broad strokes, but there are plenty of major differences in the details, and along the way this goes *much* darker than Dickens would have even considered going in his day.
The haves and have nots of Victorian England map depressingly well onto post coal Appalachia, with the added dimension of the opioid epidemic. Kingsolver does a good job in writing in a style of Dickens, which has clearly always inspired her own writing. The humor in the book is decidedly Dickensian, but she also takes her time. Remember that Dickens was usually paid by the installment (David Copperfield took 20!), so he tended to pad things, albeit in an enjoyable way. She emulates that style, luxuriating in the moment at every turn. I'm the first to admit that I'm a slow and easily distracted reader, so long books put me off. It took me three of four starts before I finished Tale of Two Cities, but I had no trouble finishing this.
That said, in the end she made this book decidedly her own. It has her trademark extensive research and celebration of nobility where others wouldn't even think to look for it. Definitely worth reading.
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 28, 2022


