Demon Copperhead

Snapshot of the Book

Two big snaps for a Pulitzer Prize winner! (Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead along with Diaz's Trust earned the 2023 Prize for Fiction).

Demon Copperhead is an update of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield, but set in Appalachia and narrated by a modern-day orphan. Kingsolver carries readers through poverty, foster care, child labour, substance abuse, and ultimately redemption.

Kingsolver explains the connection to Dickens in the foreword to her novel: "If you've read [David Copperfield], you'll see I've borrowed from him (with gratitude). If not, I hope after reading [Demon Copperhead] you will. Dickens wrote David as his own life's story, thinly disguised: a child brutalized by poverty, subsisting on scraps while working in a factory, wrenched from a mother's love. That story has been retold for as long as we've had stories. I grew up with it in rural America among neighbors who struggled with generational poverty, and I097ve spent years collecting stories of kids who lived through it. I gave them to my own child born in southern Appalachia, in a region that has long been mined of its material goods and now sees its children being used up too."

Well done, Barbara Kingsolver!