Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (HarperCollins) is a reimagining of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, set in Appalachia in the midst of the opioid epidemic, starting in the 1990s and moving into the 2000s. It weighs in at the Dickensian length of 560 pages (the audiobook is twenty one hours). After feeling daunted by all this for the year plus since the book’s release, I chose the audiobook, which is wonderfully read by Charlie Thurston. When Kingsolver was on a book tour in Britain in 2018, she saw an ad for the “Bleak House B&B,” a house where Dickens had lived. Kingsolver had been searching for a way to channel her fury over the treatment of Appalachia, her birthplace and home, from the exploitative extraction industries of timber, coal, tobacco and finally opioids. And there, sitting at Dickens’s own desk, she heard him say, “Let the child tell the novel.” Hence Demon’s first line, harkening back to David Copperfield: “First, I got myself born.” There are sixty-four characters in Demon Copperhead, so many that Kingsolver used a spreadsheet to plot their journeys. His mother is a teenage addict, and Demon is raised partly by the neighbouring Peggot clan who weave in and out of the story. After his mother’s fatal overdose, he’s exploited by a foster placement on a farm where the foster kids are used as labour for the tobacco harvest and then “returned” when the harvest is done. He goes on to become a high school football hero, but after an injury, the painkillers kick in and his downfall becomes a certainty. How he climbs back out is the heart of this epic story. One of Kingsolver’s daughters is a mental health worker for children (as one of the characters in her book is studying to become), and when Kingsolver writes about children in Appalachia who are orphans, caused by the opioid deaths of their parents, it rings true. The book is also beautiful; Kingsolver has a gift for descriptions of the natural world, and Appalachia comes alive through Demon’s eyes. I would happily listen to another twenty one hours. —Peggy Thompson

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