Review of 'Demon Copperhead' by Barbara Kingsolver

This week Barbara Kingsolver won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel Demon Copperhead. This week I finished reading Demon Copperhead. Just because a book wins the Pulitzer doesn't mean you'll enjoy it.

I have read Pulitzer Prize winners in the past and some of them I enjoyed immensely, such as Less by Andrew Sean Greer (2018 winner); All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (2015); and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2014).

On the other hand, I considered The Overstory by Richard Powers (2019) to be seriously overrated, excessively long, and complicated by esoteric words that would baffle a Scrabble player.

What didn't I like about Demon Copperhead? The novel is described as a 'masterful recasting" of David Copperfield. Apologies to Charles Dickens—I didn't read that classic. In this case, I can't make any sort of comparison.

Demon Copperhead is the coming-of-age story of an Appalachian boy struggling with poverty and, as he grows up, opioid addiction. The Pulitzer Prize committee said that the protagonist Demon Copperhead has a "wise, unwavering voice" but I found that voice annoying. And longwinded. And often veering off course in an endless stream of consciousness that was difficult for me, as a reader, to endure.

Life is hard when you're going from one uncaring foster home to the next, it's true, but I kept wishing that Demon would get his act together. He never did.

Especially irritating to me was the language of the book. I'm sure that the author got it just right—this is the way Virginian rednecks speak and act—but I found the book too Appalachian for me, for lack of a better way to describe it.

The book is long and midway, I began to long for it to end. I'll leave it for the reader to determine whether it's a happy ending or not. Maybe the novel deserves the prestigious literary prize it won, but I won't be one of its readers recommending it.

Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist and poet. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a non-fiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally.

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