Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, this is the story of an irrepressible boy nobody wants, but readers will love. Damon is the only child of a teenage alcoholic — “an expert at rehab” — in southwest Virginia.... In a feat of literary alchemy, Kingsolver uses the fire of that boy’s spirit to illuminate — and singe — the darkest recesses of our country....From the moment Demon starts talking to us, his story is already a boulder rolling down the Appalachian Mountains, faster and faster, stopping for nothing. ...Kingsolver has effectively reignited the moral indignation of the great Victorian novelist to dramatize the horrors of child poverty in the late 20th century.

In echoing Dickens, Barbara Kingsolver has written a social justice novel all her own, one only she could write, for our time and for the ages.Master storyteller Kingsolver has given the world a book that will have a ripple effect through the generations...Like all stories that stick with you, this one is both universal and decidedly personal. If you’ve lived near the Appalachians, you'll recognize these characters as well as their voice. They may even remind you of family members—those who’ve made it through, made it out, or made it back. If you haven’t, it will touch your heart anyway....That Kingsolver has shone a light on them as only she can, is a leap in understanding the hurting of a forgotten, often misunderstood and ridiculed people. Next time you see such a person, be kind, open your mind, and stop making fun of their accent.

“Demon Copperhead” reimagines Dickens’s story in a modern-day rural America contending with poverty and opioid addiction... Of course Barbara Kingsolver would retell Dickens. He has always been her ancestor. Like Dickens, she is unblushingly political and works on a sprawling scale, animating her pages with the presence of seemingly every creeping thing that has ever crept upon the earth.....Kingsolver’s prose is often splendid....And so, caught between polemic and fairy tale, Kingsolver is stuck with an anticlimax. .

With its bold reversals of fate and flamboyant cast, this is storytelling on a grand scale – Dickensian, you might say, and Kingsolver does indeed describe Demon Copperhead as a contemporary adaptation of David Copperfield....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.