Library Book Club – “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver

Up for discussion in April is Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.

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. 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 invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Transposing the Victorian epic novel of Charles Dickens’s David David Copperfield on the effects of institutional poverty and its damage to children, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ 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.

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