Reviews of demon copperhead5/24/2023 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. This would be a grim melodrama if it weren’t for Demon’s endearing humor, an alloy formed by his unaffected innocence and weary cynicism. 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’. Demon Copperhead is entirely her own thrilling story, a fierce examination of contemporary poverty and drug addiction tucked away in the richest country on Earth. 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’. The idealism and concern with social justice that are characteristic of Kingsolver’s worldview find their natural counterpart in Dickens’s impassioned social criticism. 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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