Demon Copperhead
A retelling of *David Copperfield* set in the Appalachian opioid crisis. Kingsolver takes Dickens's orphan-boy structure and uses it to indict the pharmaceutical industry, poverty, and the American abandonment of rural communities with enormous moral and narrative force. The novel Dickens would have written about America now.
The voice that charms early grates by the middle third, “crammed with quippy slangy smartarsedness” by readers’ own description. Readers call it bloated, name an institutional stretch that could go entirely, and say the accumulated hardship starts reading as a checklist. The plot is episodic, one thing after another, one reviewer saying flatly the “plot keels over onto live support around page 150.” A sharper complaint frames it as “fetishization of Appalachia,” exploiting the region’s poverty for an engineered redemption arc that leans on the same stereotypes rather than complicating them. And the ending arrives neater than five hundred pages earned.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
