From the Bookshelf of 2025 & 2026 Reading Challenge…

Demon Copperhead

Barbara Kingsolver

Start date: June 1, 2024

Finish date: June 30, 2024

Discussion: October 2025 Buddy Reads

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What Members Thought

Feb 12, 2023 Eileen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: retellings, audiobook, ownvoices, contemporary, 2023, health-mental-health, 2023-ng-group-challenge, realistic-fiction, social-justice

A true masterpiece

David Copperfield was the first Dickens novel I ever read and I remember being surprised by how much I liked it (it was a school assigned book). However, I haven’t read it since I was in high school, and I’ve been meaning to reread it ever since. So when this book came out, a friend suggested that we read both books concurrently, and that seemed like a brilliant idea. I listened to and read along with both books and started out reading a chapter or two of one book and then swit A true masterpiece

David Copperfield was the first Dickens novel I ever read and I remember being surprised by how much I liked it (it was a school assigned book). However, I haven’t read it since I was in high school, and I’ve been meaning to reread it ever since. So when this book came out, a friend suggested that we read both books concurrently, and that seemed like a brilliant idea. I listened to and read along with both books and started out reading a chapter or two of one book and then switching over to the next, which made me appreciate more fully what Kingsolver did with this book. I love how much this is both a modern retelling of David Copperfield and completely its own book.

Just like the original this book is narrated by the adult Demon (which tells you that he somehow survives all that is to come), who begins the narrative with the day he was born, with his grandmother showing up and then dismissing both him and his mother when she discovered he was not a girl. While both books contain the same number of chapters, there is not a one-to-one correlation between the books and Kingsolver spends more time on some aspects and less on others. The setting of her story is the mountains of southern Appalachia near the beginnings of the opioid epidemic and she does a skillful job highlighting the plight of the people in that area. She describes the pain of both loving the place you are in and not being able to remain there because it’s killing you. This is particularly true of the young people who grew up during that time, but as she describes, the entire community was affected. And it was not just the pharmaceutical companies that preyed on these folks, it was also the mining companies who destroyed the land and its people and then got out of there. It was the unscrupulous doctors and coaches who wanted only for kids to win games. It was about foster families just trying to survive and doing what they thought they had to in order to take care of their own kids.

Demon is a highly flawed character who is as much a victim as someone who just makes bad choices. But Kingsolver does an amazing job of making him an sympathetic character who partly makes these bad choices because he doesn’t see any other option. Even when he is praised for something, he thinks it’s something he doesn’t deserve, partly because of the way he was raised. He is quite relatable and speaks for his generation of lost boys, only some of who managed to survive.

I highly recommend this book, but there are many things described in this book that people could find triggering, including drug and alcohol addiction, suicide, mental and physical abuse, gaslighting, and sexual predators (this as more often implied than outright stated but it was still there). This was not always an easy book to read, but it was a book I could NOT put down. The only reason I didn’t finish it sooner (it took me about a week) is because I was concurrently reading David Copperfield (which I still need to finish), but when I got to the 70% mark of this book, I just couldn’t wait any longer, so I quickly finished this and will then finish David Copperfield (which I am appreciating even more because of my reading of this book).

This book was expertly read by Charlie Thurston, but I really loved reading along with him. I will probably give this a reread at some point, though, because I loved it so much, and will probably listen to it fully the second time around. ...more

5 likes · Like · see review

Dec 30, 2023 Meera rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: literary-fiction, bought23, 23fav

I had read David Copperfield this year in order to read this and I think that enhanced my reading. This was a powerful book about the opioid crisis in the Appalachia and better than the book it was inspired by IMHO. It wasn't perfect. Parts and characters that annoyed me in the Dickens' novel still annoyed me in this. The parts that were original to this novel and the author I very much enjoyed. ...more

4 likes · Like · see review

Jan 20, 2023 Anita rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Amazing soulful heartbreaking

Best book I have read in years. Captivating characters. Heartbreaking reality. Captured my attention in folirst few paragraphs. Great narration.

1 like · Like · see review