Demon Copperhead,
By Barbara Kingsolver
Synopsis
Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this 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. 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. 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.
Richard says
If your idea of an entertaining book is one where you are reading the dialect of the local gentry in authentic or near parroted form and you find it engaging to be reminded how an impoverished segment of a rural society lives in never ending squalor and poverty, then Demon Copperhead will suit you to a T. Kingsolver offers you dialogue straight from Appalachia hollers, conversations from people who are isolated and segregated from anything sounding like verbal exchanges that you normally hear. It is Ozarks ceaselessly, poverty endlessly and that impoverished environs non-stop.
There is no story, no plot, no narrative. There is no character development, no depth of personas being evaluated or described. This is not a book in the normal sense. It is an incorporation of the reader into the setting of the Appalachian valleys, among people who are poor, speak with dialect-heavy accents that most readers would only hear in a movie or on TV.
Unless one is a conversational purist, a verbal linguist or a dialogue devotee, this book has no redeemable value as a normal read. For my taste, it is a total and complete pass.
