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Last week, I learned how people in the UK and Ireland supported the US protests last Saturday.

Book: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Harper
Publication date: 2022

Source: E-book borrowed from the library

Summary: Demon Copperhead tells the story of people in the mountainous areas of Virginia who struggle with changes in the mining and tobacco industries, compounded by intentional targeting of opioids.

Everyone has a nickname. Damon naturally gets turned into Demon. Although Demon never met his father, he adopted the nickname Copperhead from him.

Throughout his childhood, Demon experiences orphanhood, foster care, child labor, underfunded schools, the primacy of football in small towns, and addiction. He weathers ups and downs with a few good friends and family members, a couple of caring teachers, and a talent for drawing.

Thoughts: An inspiration for Demon Copperhead was the Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield.

I went through a Dickens phase in high school after we performed Oliver! for the school musical in my freshman year. I remember the plot of Oliver Twist pretty well, but I realized in the past month that I have hopelessly confused the stories of Great Expectations and David Copperfield.

I kept trying to find allusions, but I only spotted one. My dad used to quote the Micawber Principle:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen, nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.
~Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

In Demon Copperhead, this advice comes from Mr. McCobb, one of several characters in the book who foster children as a way to bring more income into the household:

If you spend one penny less than you earn every month, you’ll be happy but spend a penny more than you earn, you’re done for.”

The Wikipedia article for Demon Copperhead helpfully lists the cast of characters alongside their counterparts from the Dickens’ novel.

Demon Copperhead was one of the most contentious books read by our book club.

Several of us found the characters and story fascinating and read the book obsessively, in spite of some of the devastating moments that are part of a story about poverty, whether contemporary or Victorian.

Even those of us who liked the book had to admit that it could have, perhaps, been shorter. Maybe emulating the length of a Dickens book wasn’t necessary (actually, I just looked it up — David Copperfield is nearly twice the length of Demon Copperhead, so it could have been worse).

Others disliked the book. It turned out that the reasons were kind of the opposite. A former teacher who once worked in an impoverished area found it too real and couldn’t keep reading it. Another woman who grew up in a small town didn’t think it was realistic enough, that it was too tropey. She was actually surprised to learn that Barbara Kingsolver grew up in Appalachia.

At one point during our discussion, I read this quote:

These people and vegetarians and so forth that are all about being fair to the races and the gays, I am down with that. I agree. But would it cross any mind to be fair to us? No, it would not.

The woman who thought the book was unrealistic pointed out that she knew rural people who would happily say the second part of that but would never say the first part. She asked if Barbara Kingsolver wrote things like that to make Appalachia palatable to America’s liberal white readers. That point made all of us pause.

Fortunately, we got ourselves back to humor when one member confessed that she misunderstood the David Copperfield reference. The whole time that she read the book, she was wondering what this had to do with the life story of David Copperfield, the magician. Ha! She didn’t know about the Dickens connection until we started talking about how his work illuminated poverty in Victorian England.

Appeal: I wouldn’t have read Demon Copperhead if we hadn’t selected it for book group. But I’m glad I did. Once I got going, I wanted to read every spare second.

If you’re going to read it, I think it helps to be in a place of curiosity about how people live on the margins of society. It helped me continue to answer the question about what rural Americans are so mad about. I kept thinking about the Hulu series Dopesick with Michael Keaton.

This is probably not the book to read during a personal tough time.

One of our book club members read the audio and said that the experience is wonderful, with all the characters and their different Southern accents well delineated.

Other Reviews: I’m very curious about what it would have been like to read David Copperfield and Demon Copperhead back to back. I don’t think I’m up to it myself, but I found a couple of posts by people who did just that. I learned, from them, that Demon Copperhead is more of a direct retelling of David Copperfield than I imagined.

• Book Reviews: Demon Copperhead and David Copperfield by Devon Trevarrow Flaherty at The Starving Artist
• Copperfield vs. Copperhead by Ulf Wolf at The Book Cafe on Medium

Have you read Demon Copperhead? What did you think?