Demon Copperhead – Barbara Kingsolver

Recently I finished reading Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. When I started the book I honestly didn’t know it was a kind of reinterpretation of David Copperfield from Dickens. I discovered this only while I was already reading. Even like this the book doesn’t feel like a copy, it has a very strong style of its own.

The story is narrated by Demon, a boy who is born in rural Virginia, in a trailer. His mother is a teenager and his father already died before he was born. The nickname Demon comes from his red hair. His life basically becomes a sequence of losses. He loses his mother, he loses the place where he lives, and slowly he also loses the trust in any adult. He moves between foster homes, families that explore child labor, people that should take care but clearly they don’t.

In the middle of all this he grows up. Adolescence arrives and together comes the discovery of drugs. It starts with pain medication after an injury, something that at first looks normal. But little by little it becomes addiction and opens the door for other things.

One thing I really liked in the book is the way of narration. Demon tells the story with a mix of anger and humor. He is not the kind of narrator that explains everything to the reader. It feels more like someone trying to understand what is happening while life keeps happening.

You follow a boy being thrown from one place to another, losing family, losing friends, sometimes being used by adults. And even like this he keeps going forward, mostly because there is not really another option.

There is also an interesting point in the book. It doesn’t try to put the blame in one big villain. There is no single bad guy. It feels more like a broken system around him. Poverty, abandonment, drugs, lack of structure… everything a bit mixed together.

It is a heavy book. Not exactly the type of reading to escape the world for a moment. But at the same time it is very engaging. You want to continue reading just to see how far things go, or if at some moment life becomes a little better for him.

I recommend mainly for people who like more raw and dramatic fiction. It is not exactly a comfortable story, but it is a very well told one.