DAVID COPPERFIELD is the starting point for this audiobook, but it’s not a template. Narrator Charlie Thurston’s fine regional accent takes listeners to southwest Virginia, a place that dives deep into the truths of rural poverty. Damon Fields tells his own story, as in the Dickens novel, but he faces difficulties beyond what the English author imagined. One such challenge is the transformation of his name, which occurs because of his bright red hair. Nearly everyone in this story is from Lee County, so accents don’t vary much. But Thurston manages to suggest all the major characters with subtle shifts of timbre, and he keeps Damon’s sad narrative from sounding like whining. The novel is depressing yet gripping, and its conclusion, at least, is hopeful. D.M.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

★ 08/29/2022

Kingsolver (Unsheltered) offers a deeply evocative story of a boy born to an impoverished single mother. In this self-styled, modern adaptation of Dickens’s David Copperfield, Demon Copperhead, 11, is the quick-witted son and budding cartoonist of a troubled young mother and a stepfather in southern Appalachia’s Lee County, Va.; eventually, his mother’s opioid addiction places Demon in various foster homes, where he is forced to earn his keep through work (even though his guardians are paid) and is always hungry from lack of food. After a guardian steals his money, Demon hitchhikes to Tennessee in search of his paternal grandmother. She is welcoming, but will not raise him, and sends him back to live with the town’s celebrated high school football coach as his new guardian, a widower who lives in a castle-like home with his boyish daughter, Angus. Demon’s teen years settle briefly with fame on the football field and a girlfriend, Dori. But stability is short-lived after a football injury and as he and Dori become addicted to opioids (“We were storybook orphans on drugs”). Kingsolver’s account of the opioid epidemic and its impact on the social fabric of Appalachia is drawn to heartbreaking effect. This is a powerful story, both brilliant in its many social messages regarding foster care, child hunger, and rural struggles, and breathless in its delivery. (Oct.)

"Demon is a voice for the ages—akin to Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield—only even more resilient. I’m crazy about this book, which parses the epidemic in a beautiful and intimate new way. I think it’s her best.” — Beth Macy, author of Dopesick

“Brilliant. . . . A page turner and Kingsolver’s best novel by far. . . . Kingsolver has some of Mark Twain in her, along with 21st-century gifts of her own. More than ever, she is our literary mirror and window. May this novel be widely read and championed.” — Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"May be the best novel of 2022...Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, this is the story of an irrepressible boy nobody wants, but readers will love….You may be reminded of another orphaned boy slipping through the country’s underbrush, just trying to stay out of trouble: Huck Finn. With Demon, Kingsolver has created an outcast equally reminiscent of Twain’s masterpiece, speaking in the natural poetry of the American vernacular….Kingsolver's best demonstration yet of a novel’s ability to simultaneously entertain and move and plead for reform."
— Ron Charles, Washington Post

“If you’re familiar with the Charles Dickens classic, you’ll follow the story’s beats and chuckle….What keeps you turning the pages is the knowledge that Demon has a future. The novel ends on a note of hope...not every fate is decided by the circumstances of one’s birth.”   — Associated Press

"There’s really nothing like being immersed in a Kingsolver novel. . . . Damon [is Kingsolver’s] bravest, most ambitious creation yet." — Los Angeles Times

“Kingsolver’s capacious, ingenious, wrenching, and funny survivor’s tale is a virtuoso present-day variation on Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. . . . Kingsolver’s tour de force is a serpentine, hard-striking tale of profound dimension and resonance.” — Booklist (Starred Review)

“An epic…brimming with vitality and outrage….the rare 560-page book you wish would never end.”
— People "Book of the Week"

“With its bold reversals of fate and flamboyant cast, this is storytelling on a grand scale. . . . As Demon discovers, owning his story—every part of it—and finding a way to tell it is how he’ll wrest some control over his life. And what a story it is: acute, impassioned, heartbreakingly evocative, told by a narrator who’s a product of multiple failed systems, yes, but also of a deep rural landscape with its own sustaining traditions.”   — The Guardian

“Extraordinary. . . . Much like Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain or Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Kingsolver’s epic is narrated by a self-professed screwup with a heart of gold . . . chock-full of cinematic twists and turns. It’s a book that demands we start paying attention to—and embracing—a long-ignored community and its people." — San Francisco Chronicle

"Kingsolver's new novel is her best in years. . . . The character of Damon is right up there with the best classic orphans of literatre. Believe me: you will root for this lost boy." — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“In Demon Copperhead…Kingsolver channels the voice of a disenfranchised boy lost in the failures of our social system. It's a testament to her storytelling mastery that this novel also illustrates how deeply intertwined our attitudes about nature are with our collective destiny. As always, her purpose is to make us think about the ways we all must look out for each other.” — Arizona Republic

“Absorbing….Readers see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath Demon’s self-protective exterior…. Emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it…. An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.” — Kirkus Review (Starred Review)

“A deeply evocative story…Kingsolver’s account of the opioid epidemic and its impact on the social fabric of Appalachia is drawn to heartbreaking effect. This is a powerful story, both brilliant in its many social messages regarding foster care, child hunger, and rural struggles, and breathless in its delivery.” — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“Kingsolver brings a notably different energy from her previous work to Demon Copperhead…through a tremendous narrative voice, one so sharp and fresh as to overwhelm the reader’s senses….Demon’s spirit comes through, and it is haunting. It’s the reason the pages keep turning….Kingsolver has made this story her own, and what a joy it is to slip into this world and inhabit it, even with all its challenges.” — BookPage

“Demon Copperhead is a propulsive reading experience, energetic and funny while still conveying Kingsolver’s fury at the institutions that have let her community down.” — Slate

“You’ll be enthralled by [Demon’s] voice, simultaneously hilarious and wise, as he illuminates life in rural America…..this is the ideal late-fall read to sink your teeth into.”
— Real Simple

“A dazzling novel….a lyrical re-dreaming of Dickens’s David Copperfield. The social injustices of Victorian England have been transplanted, with spellbinding success, to modern-day Appalachia…populated by America’s rural white underclass and now ravaged by the opioid crisis…Kingsolver maintains an astonishing level of energy and intensity….This novel is surely a highpoint of Kingsolver’s long career and a strong early candidate for next year's Booker Prize.” — Times Literary Supplement

“A riveting, epic tale…[Kingsolver’s] exquisite writing takes a wrenching story and makes it worthwhile… Kingsolver has given us a superb novel.” — Christian Science Monitor

"A heartrending, probing and ultimately hopeful tale about a young boy’s journey from devastation to survival….It’s hard to ascertain which is more brilliant, Kingsolver’s skill in modernizing Dickens’ narrative or the voice she gives to the privations and adversities facing the land and people she so dearly loves.”   — Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"This is storytelling at its best. The voice rings true and so do the incidents." — Stephen King

05/01/2022

A boy born to a single, teenage mother grows up tough in Appalachia, demonstrating a remarkable capacity for surviving foster care, child labor, and terrible schools while balancing athletic triumph with heartbreak and addiction. What matters most: his rural roots ultimately render him invisible to society. A contemporaneous David Copperfield; with a 250,000-copy first printing.

DAVID COPPERFIELD is the starting point for this audiobook, but it’s not a template. Narrator Charlie Thurston’s fine regional accent takes listeners to southwest Virginia, a place that dives deep into the truths of rural poverty. Damon Fields tells his own story, as in the Dickens novel, but he faces difficulties beyond what the English author imagined. One such challenge is the transformation of his name, which occurs because of his bright red hair. Nearly everyone in this story is from Lee County, so accents don’t vary much. But Thurston manages to suggest all the major characters with subtle shifts of timbre, and he keeps Damon’s sad narrative from sounding like whining. The novel is depressing yet gripping, and its conclusion, at least, is hopeful. D.M.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

★ 2022-07-14
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.

It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.