NWBC Book Club - Demon Copperhead - Pulitzer Prize winning book by Barbara Kingsolver

Join the Book Club to discuss this Pulitzer Prize winning book by Barbara Kingsolver at the home of  Saralee Woods.  Kathleen Mcenerney has graciously volunteered to lead discussion of the book.  

This 560 page novel is a modern day telling of David Copperfield.  

“An Appalachian David Copperfield. . . . Demon Copperhead reimagines Dickens’s story in a modern-day rural America contending with poverty and opioid addiction. . . . .Kingsolver and Dickens overlap: both of them exuberant writers of social novels with a strong political message and a concern for the lower classes. . . . Kingsolver’s novel sweeps you along just as powerfully as the original does.” — New York Times

Oprah (who selected "Demon Copperhead for her book club in 2022), says, “It’s an absolutely riveting read.” Demon Copperhead re-envisions the Charles Dickens classic David Copperfield, setting it in modern-day Appalachia. Kingsolver was inspired while on a visit to Dickens’s seaside English retreat and actually started writing Demon Copperhead at Dickens's own desk. It’s Kingsolver’s 17th novel in some three decades, and in writing it, Kingsolver says she wanted to counter some of the condescension and downright snobbery directed at the region in which she was born and still lives, a region whose people, she believes, have been exploited for generations, most recently by pharmaceutical companies who targeted Appalachian residents and created the current opioid crisis.

"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

“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

 Ann Patchett in conversation with Barbara Kingsolver see below link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyeDv4eWk7U

If you do not already own the book, support our members, Cat Bock and Karen Hayes and purchase yours at Parnassus Books.  Tell them it is for the NWBC book club and receive 10% off.