Demon Copperhead-audio by Barbara Kingsolver

 

My thoughts

This was my first Barbara Kingsolver book and my third Audio. This was by far the best book. The audio was perfect. The Narrator did such a great job you could feel every little thing. 

This book is about a boy. A boy and his life's ups and downs. Mostly downs but a few ups in there. Set in the Appalachians. In a trailer. Born to a teenage mother. This kid really started out at the bottom of the chain. It holds your attention all the way to the soft sweet ending. What all this child goes through is heartbreaking and very realistic. 

The author did such a good job of describing the events in this novel. Each thing that happened to Demon Copperhead made you stop and take a long look at life. At how things can happened exactly as told. How in some instances things are just out of our control. Things that some people look down on others for having no idea it could happen to them or one of their loved ones. I think in some of the things I heard in this book happen in all families in some way or the other. It's devastating and so sad to think of but also very realistic. Demon has so many losses in his young life. To say that he made his choices is unrealistic. You would have to take a walk in his shoes to see that maybe.

I am so glad I listened to the audio version of this book. The narrator takes you through so much and his use of voices in places makes it feel like more than just a book. He told a story here. A story that everyone should read. Or listen too. 

I see why this book won the author a pulitzer prize. It's that good. It's that real. It's all that and much more. It's a must read. 

Five huge stars and deserves more. A tearjerker. 

Synopsis

Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.