A Big Book Teeming With Life

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver is a big book. It’s about being born, struggling to survive, finding yourself, losing yourself, redemption, family and kin you’re born with and those you choose, being tied to a place on the planet with a fierceness fiction rarely sees, hitting rock bottom, crawling out of a hole of your own making, people who love each other in every shade of loving, and life resurrecting itself like a cold dark mountain ridge as sunrise hits on a spring morning when redbuds and mountain laurel are in bloom. It’s the Appalachian Spring of literature, breaking hearts and lifting them with hauntingly beautiful melodies.  

The characters are so vivid they rise off the page, ready to escape the one dimensional world, testing themselves against the worst and best the world has in store. From wards of the state placed in foster home slave labor farms to those taken in by families for the cash they bring, the system begins testing from early age. Whether it’s the tyranny of childhood bullies or poverty’s hunger that never dies, the will to survive is at play. Patterns of substance abuse and violence in families threaten to bring down future generations. Character is forged in the survival mechanisms and community built from within, facing off against what seems like a rigged system imprisoning them. 

The land is more than a backdrop in an elementary school play. It’s a harsh mistress testing lives, crushing souls, and birthing generations. From dusty roads to the grip of mud threatening imprisonment in mire, to storm swollen rivers with jagged cliffs slippery as ice, sending those who lack respect on a fast one way trip into the unseen world. The same steep climb that challenges everything knowable one minute, is also the nourishing hillside that connects and embraces hearts finding solace and strength in the familiar delicate wildflowers that rise from loamy pine scented forest floors, and the wildlife claiming it as home. 

It paints a picture of society born in the crucible of humanity’s deepest insecurities, desires for power, wealth, and control in the governmental and corporate playgrounds where factions covertly engage in the contests that write history, both tragic and heroic. It’s about the eternal struggle to rise above station, or simply survive it, kicking through churning waters to keep afloat, making both families and a mark in the hostile world, and surviving mistakes so they become a foundation for self actualization. It’s about a world that seems to conspire against the odds of survival, but like the tide traveling up a soft warm beach, it relinquishes treasures to those with the patience to search.