Kingsolver is an American novelist whose books regularly make the New York Times Best Seller list. Kingsolver bases her novel on Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) to connect the present to the past, to combine cultures, and to adapt Dickens’s mission of using literature to hold a mirror up to society.
The story exposes the systemic failures of American institutions but celebrates the resiliency of the individual spirit. Kingsolver does an incredible job, finding parallels between Dickens and a boy’s life in her homelands, the Southern Appalachian mountains of Virginia, that wouldn’t be obvious at a glance.Set in Lee County, Virginia, Demon Copperhead uses the first-person point of view of its titular character to juxtapose the world’s beauty and ugliness. Set aside as much time as you’d need to read Dickens, that’s my first tip! It doesn’t look that long – certainly it doesn’t have the heft of its source material – but it’s a saga, and time consuming to read. It’s beautifully designed, with rich blues and shimmering gold, reflecting the ups and downs of the story itself. The wonderful team at Faber Books (via Allen & Unwin) sent me a copy of Demon Copperhead for review. Is this Dickens’s classic David Copperfield, or Barbara Kingsolver’s new epic, Demon Copperhead? Believe it or not, it’s both!
A boy born to harrowing circumstances, abused by his stepfather, orphaned, put to work while still a child, battling poverty and demons at every turn, with a wide cast of curious and captivating characters.
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