“First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it.”

And so begins Barbara Kingsolver’s DEMON COPPERHEAD, a modern-day Appalachian David Copperfield story. A boy cannot escape the horrors of the opioid epidemic in one of the most beautiful yet poor parts of the American expanse. With the social concern of Dickens and the need to share how this happens to people who don’t plan it, Kingsolver brings passion and pathos to one young man’s account.

"The reader will connect to Demon in countless ways, but especially in his lack of agency. The book starts from the moment of his birth, and he offers his account without influencer-type victimization..."

Damon was called “Demon” by kids in the schoolyard. This turns out to be an apt nickname as it refers to the angriest of the many snakes that populate the wilderness around his home, the Copperhead. Demon bites to protect himself; he is born with a sense of love for the world and open mind that is consistently seen as worthy of chopping down like a beautiful young sapling in a dangerous territory. His gay best friend, his evil stepfather, his drugged-out mom, the Uriah Heep types who run the foster homes where he is sent --- they are all Dickensian personalities writ large in this low point of American history.

Demon tells his story like Huck Finn. The rhythm of his thoughts and the playful but lower-class syntax of his speech put him in his place. There are, however, so many opportunities for Demon to not have to bend to the expected in his world. But with a dead dad, well-meaning but powerless friends and family trying to help him, and a broken foster care system, he ends up exactly where we don’t want to see him go --- which is the point. Still, there is a whole journey here and one well worth traveling.

Kingsolver is a serious studier of American trauma and, as a novelist, tends to set her stories in a real place in a real time with a real problem that seems unsolvable. She manages to give these people more compassion than the real world gives them, and she offers a way out --- not in terms of process, but of how society as a whole can see this issue and shift it into a more positive gear. It will be her legacy as a novelist. As with many great authors like Upton Sinclair, Mark Twain or Toni Morrison, there is the sense that fiction can often get at a societal problem with so much heart and conviction that one can finally start to understand how deep a hole it has created in so many real people’s lives.

The reader will connect to Demon in countless ways, but especially in his lack of agency. The book starts from the moment of his birth, and he offers his account without influencer-type victimization --- he just is, and this is his story. It is that truthful, matter-of-fact tone that reaches into the reader’s heart and mind and pulls out even more compassion than any Appalachian drug documentary could.