With each choice, Demon’s spirit comes through, and it is haunting. He’s willing to take risks, he cares about his people and community, and he often looks for the best in a moment, even if he doesn’t fully understand what he’s facing. At each turn, he finds ways to make things work. He faces such challenges as the foster system, child labor and his own desire to find success and a meaning for his life. Demon is born into poverty with only his teenage mother to call family, though she later becomes entangled in an abusive relationship. In many ways, Demon Copperhead is a novel of survival-of finding one’s way through the mess of it all and living with dignity. She does all this through a tremendous narrative voice, one so sharp and fresh as to overwhelm the reader’s senses. Barbara Kingsolver brings a notably different energy from her previous work to Demon Copperhead, a novel that dwells in the challenges of impoverished southern Appalachian communities and honors the ways in which our landscapes shape us. When the region does become the subject of a book, as rarely as that may be, it’s frequently misrepresented. Appalachia is a place that’s often ignored, forgotten or written over.
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