So where good education and family love are thin on the ground, as they are in Demon's remote, near abandoned community in rural Virginia, bad choices are all too often the norm.ĭemon has spells of good fortune but these are greatly outnumbered by grim phases in his life brought on by his mis-reading of personal relationships, sheer bad luck, and by his repeated attempts to find solace in opioids.

Also, however, kindness and love are out there but, somehow, Demon repeatedly makes bad choices and so is forever perpetuating his own misery.īut Kingsolver's aim in writing this novel is to try and explain how, if you are born into poverty and social hardship, avoiding succumbing to drugs, alcohol and petty crime is always going to require high levels of confidence and self-belief. Her novel tells the story of Demon's early life in which he is orphaned, fostered and exposed to a multitude of hardships, some of which are self-inflicted. Inspired by the early life of Charles Dickens and based on 'David Copperfield', Barbara Kingsolver has written a episodic novel about Daemon Fielding. Many thanks to Faber and Faber for sending me a review copy via NetGalley. However, Kingsolver demonstrates a lot of empathy for her characters, and the book is a powerful examination in its own right of the devastating impact of the Ox圜ontin epidemic. The danger of using ‘David Copperfield’ as an inspiration is that some elements of the plot can appear clichéd. I haven’t read ‘David Copperfield’ so it’s likely that there are nuances and parallels with specific characters and events that I missed, although it’s still possible to see the more general Dickensian tropes, particularly where messages about compassion and depictions of poverty are concerned.

Demon Copperhead is the nickname of Damon Fields who is born in a trailer to an alcoholic teenage mother and taken into foster care after she dies.

Longlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver is a modern retelling of ‘David Copperfield’ by Charles Dickens set in southwest Virginia in the 1990s.

Demon copperfield review