Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver

Demon Copperhead is about six when we first meet him, as he and his cousin Maggot ramble happily around the mountains and streams of rural Appalachia, contented residents of Lee County, Virginia, a community that is both solace and trap. Demon lives in a trailer with his mother; Maggot lives next door with his grandparents. The book follows Demon for the next 15 years as he becomes an orphan, tobacco picker, foster child, football star, drug addict, husband, widower, friend, lover, grandson, cartoonist, and nascent graphic novel author. It’s a life mirrored after Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, but with foster homes in place of orphanages, oxycontin instead of gin. Poverty, powerlessness, and child exploitation are much the same.

Our group had varied responses to the novel. At 548 pages of intense prose and chaos, it is daunting. Some found it mesmerizing and were sucked into the story, eager to keep reading to see how Demon approached his next trauma. Others needed to regularly take a breather, not wanting to face another bad decision and more destruction of Demon’s brittle life.

The book’s voice is its biggest strength. Demon narrates with the angst of a child, the naivete of a teen, and the hope of a young adult. He shares humor, pain, wisdom, and cluelessness in what is essentially a journal in which he is trying to figure himself out.  Kingsolver nails it, showing us how a life of deprivation and degradation can lead to what more privileged people consider poor choices; for those in the middle of the storm, they simply feel like the best of multiple bad options. As the story builds and Demon’s life destructs, we begin to understand why he is how he is, why he does what he does, and how he ultimately becomes who he is. His voice is full of heart, but it is also heartbreaking.

The book won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

This is the seventh Kingsolver book we have read as a group, and we have watched as she has grown as a writer, starting with The Bean Trees, published in 1988. Most of her books contain themes of social justice and environmental stress. The villains in Demon Copperhead are the mining companies that degraded the land, extracting what they wanted and leaving the residents to live with their mess; the drug companies that knew how addictive pills like oxy were, but pushed them anyway; a frayed social network that has no place for kids in poverty; and a healthcare system that doesn’t reach rural America.

Lee County is its own social ecosystem in which you can’t hide from your past. Old acquaintances pop up in Demon’s life, some for the better, others for the worse.  The Peggots are always somewhere in the background, showing Demon how home looks.  Aunt June leaves the Doom Castle (her apartment in Knoxville) to practice medicine “back home,” and helps Demon find the care, and cure, he needs. Fast Forward, the football star who first introduced Demon to drugs, returns and causes one of the book’s most traumatic events. Emmy follows Demon on a downhill spiral. Tommy, the lost foster kid who seemed destined for a dead-end life, helps Demon discover his future. Mr. Armstrong and Miss Annie never waver in their support of Demon. And, of course, Angus is Demon’s truth.

For Demon, Lee County is home. He cannot envision living anywhere else, especially in a city apartment where people don’t even have lawns, let alone woods and mountains. His people may be a mess, but they are his. He loves them and learns that they love him too. Throughout the novel, he strives to belong and, finally, at the end he does. And we assume he will finally see the ocean—because Angus is in charge.

— Pat Prijatel

I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, by Maggie O’Farrell

This is not your average memoir. With stark self-awareness and insight, novelist Maggie O’Farrell throws us into the middle of her life through 17 essays about life-threatening and often harrowing events that define how she became who she is. She lightly weaves her biography throughout, giving us enough of a glimpse of her personal trajectory to understand as much as we need to know about how she got from point A to point B and why. But the book is primarily a sensory exploration of how it feels to be Maggie O’Farrell.

Much of what happens in O’Farrell’s life stems from a case of encephalitis when she was eight, the effects of which she shows throughout the book. But she waits until the penultimate chapter to explain the disease, trusting her reader to stay with her. She shows before she tells. It’s risky, but it works.

Because of encephalitis, her brain can’t accurately place her in her environment, so she often fights for physical balance, her muscles cannot provide enough strength for childbirth, she can stutter at book readings, and simply walking up to the stage at an event is a feat in itself.  

Her life sometimes defies belief, and she seems to take questionable risks, but she says being so ill so young changed her and made her embrace life with a passion few possess:

I am desperate for change, endlessly seeking novelty, wherever I can find it. When you’re a child, no one tells you that you are going to die. You have to work it out for yourself.

She has survived assaults that could have killed her—one of her attackers murdered another young woman shortly after he put his camera strap menacingly around O’Farrell’s throat. O’Farrell outwitted him by doing what she does with remarkable power: using her words.

Other brushes with death include three near-drownings, two more assaults, a child with deadly allergies, and multiple “missed miscarriages” in which the baby dies, but the mother has no symptoms of the loss. All this both forms and is a result of a personality that embraces risk, requires change, and is deeply introspective. In a relatively short book, O’Farrell shows how she was molded into a woman, a mother, and a writer of courage and intensity.

— Pat Prijatel

Before We Were Yours, by Lisa Wingate

This novel is based on true events that actually boggle the mind of the modern reader. Georgia Tann was a prominent maven of Tennessee society who sought to better society through the adoption of poor, underprivileged children into wealthy socially-advantaged families. Operating during the distressed times of the 1930s Depression, she established the Tennessee Children’s Home Society which operated orphanages across Tennessee and Georgia. That good intention went badly awry, however, and many of the children who ended up in these orphanages were never actually given up for adoption by their birth families. Some were snatched up on their way home from school. Others were taken from parents who were conned into signing away their parental rights by promises that their children would be returned when the family could get back on their feet. When the parents tried to reclaim their children, adoptions had been finalized, names changed, and records sealed. All of that is true and it is a grisly story that continued for more than a decade.

Against this history, Wingate structures her novel in two voices. The voice of 12-year-old Rill in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1939 alternates with that of Avery, a 30-something daughter of wealth and privilege in modern-day Aiken, South Carolina. Rill’s story moves us forward in time. Avery’s story ultimately unravels backward through the unsuspected secrets of her family,

Rill is the oldest of five children who were taken from their family’s vagabond houseboat on the Mississippi River when their father takes their mother to the hospital. Her story and the story of her siblings unfolds over a three-month period in alternating chapters of the book as Rill, rechristened May in the orphanage, fights to keep her sisters and brother with her.

In the interwoven story, Avery encounters a woman, May, in a nursing home who grabs her wrist and takes a bracelet that was given to Avery by her grandmother.  Avery’s grandmother is in the dementia unit of a different nursing home. As Avery retrieves her bracelet, she begins to talk with May and sees a photograph that looks suspiciously like one that her grandmother has. 

We see where this is going. And it does go there, at a fast tempo, and with some riveting scenes and phrases (such as fans trying to move humid summer air that has no desire to be moved). 

Our book club mostly enjoyed reading this book and it is indeed a good tale.  However, many thought the “Avery” story was too pat, too romance-novel-ish and used unnecessarily stereotyped characters, particularly Avery’s fiancé and the man who helps her unravel her family’s past. Our discussions of the book mostly centered around the character of Rill and her mighty efforts to save her siblings and their memories of their “real” parents; and around Georgia Tann, who died before she could be charged with the crimes she committed; and around our society’s changing views about adoption. The book did push us to consider what we might have done in the circumstances that confronted families in abject poverty during the Depression.  What might we have done to save our children? The scene where a father comes to the orphanage to reclaim his children and is told that they are already gone “to a better life,” is riveting. 

— Review by Jeanie and Bill Smith