This book will break your heart and fill it up again, a phenomenal journey that deserves all the awards. The sweeping story reminds me of two other epic novels I’ve loved - John Irving’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” and John Boyne’s “The Heart’s Invisible Furies.”
Demon’s voice is the star of this show, as he faces adversity with humanity and even humor. NEW YORK The Pulitzer Prize for fiction was awarded Monday to two class-conscious novels: ' Demon Copperhead,' Barbara Kingsolver's modern recasting of the Dickens classic 'David Copperfield. Kingsolver recasts the Victorian novel to contemporary rural America, giving us a character who braves poverty, foster care, addiction, and countless other challenges. Familiarity or even a passing knowledge of Dickens is not a prerequisite for this book. Her novel is a 560-page epic and a modern retelling of “David Copperfield,” but please don’t let that dissuade you from picking it up. Nicknamed Demon Copperhead for his red hair, Damon lives with his mother on the property of the Peggots, and his best friend is Matt Peggot, known as Maggot. Her first was 22 years ago, when Oprah named The Poisonwood Bible (1998) as a pick. This is Kingsolver’s second appearance as an OBC author. Both novels explore issues of wealth, poverty and the American dream - “Trust” being set in 1920s New York and “Demon Copperhead” in southern Appalachia.Īnd while both are destined to become classics, Kingsolver’s work took me on an emotional journey that I just can’t stop thinking about. Barbara Kingsolver is the author of 'Demon Copperhead'. Damon Fields is born in southwest Virginia in the late 1980s to a teenage mother who has equipped herself for childbirth with gin, amphetamines and Vicodin. Oprah sat down for a conversation with Barbara Kingsolver, whose epic novel Demon Copperhead is the latest OBC selectionthe 98th in the 26-year history of Oprah’s Book Club. Yet, rather than feeling for the characters’ wasted and brutalised lives, the reader is too busy focusing on Kingsolver’s virtuosic reworking of their models.I’ve read both prize-winners (which may be a first in my history), and I whole-heartedly agree with the Pulitzer committee. She writes in an afterword that she wants to counter ‘hillbilly stereotypes’ and draw attention to ‘the limited choices and suffocated hopes, poverty built into a region by historical design’. But her fidelity to Dickens’s plot is an increasing distraction. Only Uriah Heep (here U-Haul) and the Micawbers (the McCobbs) are poorly integrated into her scheme. The parallels proliferate Kingsolver even has Emmy living in ‘a geographic dome… like a boat turned upside down’, redolent of Mr Peggotty’s ‘black barge’. Like David, Demon is reunited with Betsy, an elderly female relative (here his grandmother), and her disabled brother Dick (thankfully without King Charles’s head), before going to live with Coach Winfield and his daughter Agnes, whom he initially takes for a boy, and falling in love with the drug-addled Dori, who, like Dora Spenlow in the original, has a snappish dog named Jip.
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