Read. Write. Listen. Create.

When I first heard that my book club would be reading Demon Copperhead, I automatically looked at the length of the book and thought “no way!” I didn’t want to read a book that was twenty-one hours long when we usually read around twelve hours per book. That and the fact that I didn’t really connect with the topic and thought I wouldn’t like the story…but I was wrong. A classic ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ situation. This is the first 5 out of 5 stars I’ve given a book from book club.

BookBrowse.com’s short summary says, “Coming of Age in the Shadow of Appalachia; Demon grows up orphaned and poor in the midst of a drug-centered area of rural Virginia. His relationships are detailed and his ingenuity highlighted as he overcomes the worst of situations to finally find love and happiness.” It is based off of the book, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.

Damon who is nicknamed Demon is a Melungeon which is a group of people from Appalachia. It essentially means “mixed” and in the book Demon is a mix of African American, Native American, and White. He has red hair and dark skin.

Because of the way that the book is written, it feels like Demon is a real person and is telling his story. It was a lot of telling and not really showing with detailed descriptions, but I think the length of the book allows for longer and more drawn out storytelling. Towards the end of the book, we find out that he is recounting his life during rehab.

When Demon starts meeting other kids along his foster home journey, the names reminded me of character’s names from the book, Holes and as a member of my book club pointed out, everyone in the south has a nickname given to them at birth. I liked how he learned things from each house he lived in. Some of the topics that the book covers are very sad and depressing (like the opioid crisis) and it’s hard to remember that Demon is only around 12 years old at the time. When he starts playing football in high school and gets injured, I could sense that painkiller drugs were about to be introduced to him and they were. I thought he was going to end up like his mom who overdosed on drugs.

When it starts to feel as though he’ll never get out of his long battle with drugs, he finds the newspaper job and starts drawing for a comic strip he created. Along the way, he has relationships that make him who he is at the end of the book and I felt like he grew from every relationship he had. I really enjoyed this book and felt like the pacing really made the book and I definitely recommend listening to the audiobook. Charlie Thurston does an amazing job! “Narrator Charlie Thurston’s fine regional accent takes listeners to southwest Virginia…Thurston manages to suggest all the major characters with subtle shifts of timbre…The novel is depressing yet gripping…Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award (AudioFile).”

There were varying opinions on this book. People in the book club found it very troubling and hard to process when Demon ends up with Agnus or Angus as she’s nicknamed. She was his foster sister and people in the group thought that was too much, but they’re best friends and I thought it was a happy ending for him.

A lot of the drug use and overdoses were hard to read, but I think books that are out of our comfort zone and show a group of people in a different light is refreshing and make us think. Demon is a lovable character and I enjoyed hearing him tell his story, even if he is a fictional character, his life story rings true to real people living in rural Virginia and around the world and I like that kind of representation.